Splinters
by Thrythlind
Summary: Six women wake up in worlds not their own, in bodies from the prime of their lives and feeling somehow more powerful than they could ever remember being. Ranma 1/2, Naruto, Fate/Stay Night, DC Comics, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Dresden Files.
1. Waking Up (All)

Author's rant (752 words of what's up with me and plans I have for different storylines follows)

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><p>So this is just a little idea I had come up and started writing on to break a bit of writer's block. For those who think that explains why I haven't posted anything new or continued anything for more than a year. No, that's not it.<p>

What's going on is I've been doing some original works. Head out to DrivethruRPG and look up Thrythlind Books and Games and you'll find five novels, eleven short stories, an anthology, a system-agnostic RPG campaign guide and a Fate-Powered RPG setting. One of the novels, the Fate RPG book and the short stories represent a rewrite of the Divine Blood fanfic done as an original setting.

Combined with my full-time teaching and some other projects, it's eaten most of my time.

I don't know how much further I'll go with this, but it presents some interesting possibilities. As usual for me, the premise is complex and involves multiple franchises.

I think I need to do more fanfic writing in order to keep up my original writing. Fanfic writing helps me come up with ideas and is just fun. I don't have to worry so much about editing or formatting. I don't have pay for covers or illustrations. I get actual commentary.

It's just fun and I need that.

I don't want to get too many people hopeful, because my time is limited. But here's what's floating around in my head. None of these are guaranteed.

I'm thinking of doing a reboot of Martial Artists and Mayhem using the 5th ed.

I'm also rereading Chi and Chakra and thinking of progressing that at least to the Valley of the End.

Duel Wielding I know what I want to happen so I might consider that as well.

Outside Context is being a pain. I'm at about the part where my Planeswalker's plans are falling apart, which was the plan. The Fate/Stay Night setting was always just meant for prologue not primary meat. But I'm having issues getting from where I am to where I want to go. I am sure that some of what I plan will annoy people over at the Beast's Lair, but what else is new.

A would like to continue New Life too. That has short chapters and should be good for getting me pushed on.

This fic, Splinters, I don't have much more than these intro scenes planned. At the moment, I'm not even entirely certain what the primary threat is, which makes it hard to plan out more. That said, there's a lot I can do with the various women just dealing with the settings I placed them in. (I rather feel sorry for Widow being stuck in a setting that's less lethal than the others, at least to start, but it will likely get more so as things go on.)

Divine Blood is unlikely to advance until the novels and short stories catch up to the fan fic. The novels are taking a slightly different tact, and developing a bit faster though, so that should help. (I speak in relative terms. The first 40k words of the fanfic resulted in a 150k word novel.)

As to my projects for original works, these will take priority:

I am running one-shot gaming nights online from here in Japan and I'm about 2 weeks late in publishing a new episode. These are one shot explorations of various tabletop RPGs. I've done Kuro, Numenera and am currently working on Accursed.

I am working on a sequel to the novel Bystander, I have about 14k of 75k planned words written.

I am waiting on art to put up with a twelfth Divine Blood $1 short story. After that, I will be producing three more shorts which will only be available in a compilation. The short stories are currently showing far more divergence from the fanfic than the novel did.

After the holidays, I will be writing a campaign guide for the slice-of-life style campaign for the Divine Blood RPG. It will focus on drama and comedy rather than life and death scenarios and thus deal more with the Community and civilian psychics than trained warriors. A mecha/upright warfare campaign guide will likely come after that.

I have discussed with Battlefield Press about working together on a new RPG. Since that is not entirely my project, I'll keep quite on the theme. However, I have worked with them before on both the Gaslight Victorian RPG and the Double Spiral War RPG.

Hopefully, my original works take off either on Amazon (look up Luke Green) or DrivethruRPG and I'll be able to make them my day job and thus have more time for fanfiction again. But until then, my fanfic is going to continue to be slow to come out. Given they've been around some time already, this is doubtful, but can always hope.

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><p>Actual story.<p>

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><p>Consciousness came slowly in a serious of foggy blinks. The surrounding world resolved into a narrow, dingy alleyway between two tallish brownstone buildings. A festering scent of collected garbage assaulted the young woman's senses as she pushed herself to standing. It was after dark and the shadows were long. A slight powdering of snow was just beginning to descend out of the sky though there were signs that the storm was going to get worse.<p>

"This is not my cell," the young woman noted as she looked around, trying to get a sense of just where exactly she was.

She was dressed warmly, at least. She noted the gloves on her hands and the scarf around her neck. The wool jacket was another layer over the shirt and school jacket and the leotard underneath. She was wearing the old uniform and she could tell from the variations of chi and weight that most of her old arsenal was in place as well.

She grimaced and looked about for cameras.

"I'm not sure why the nostalgia for my teen years," she commented with a raised voice to the air around her, "but if whoever has deposited me here would do me the favor of presenting a mission briefing I can get through with this and back to my prison cell."

No answer seemed immediately forthcoming, much to her annoyance.

"Well, what do we have here?" The voice spoke English with a rough sort of imprecise tone. "You look like you come from some sort of money, girl. Why don't you hand some of it over to me and my friends here."

The young woman turned about to stare at the four thuggish brutes that had somehow managed to materialize behind her. No stance to speak of. Significant size relative to her. A particular sound spoke to the presence of a switchblade knife and one of them was smacking a bat against his open hand in a vaguely threatening manner.

"Were I you, I would not dare to proceed further on this matter," she commented waving at them with a dismissive back hand as she turned to walk casually away from the thugs. Her own reaction struck a sour note with her. There was something about it that nagged at her.

There was a snarl as they took the insult and the scraping of boots on cold stone as they ran at her back. Her body reacted slower than she was used to, but it was still swift enough. A reverse cartwheel brought her heel in contact with the skull of one of her attackers, sending a shock of the impact down her leg and numbing it slightly, putting her off balance slightly as she righted herself. She took the chance to affirm her balance as she sidestepped the swing of the bat and drawing forth her own club and swinging it up into her target's face in reaction. For a moment she was tempted to depress the button and she had to remind herself there was no need to kill simple street thugs.

The distraction allowed for the switchblade wielding thug the chance to lash out and try to stab up through her face for some reason. Likely he had meant to slice her throat and misjudged the angle. A warm, wet sensation trickled down her face and she became acutely aware that a line had been cut across her face.

A thick, boiling rage erupted within her. "You dare. You DARE! You dare to mark the face of the glorious Kodachi Kuno, the Blood Rose!?"

As she railed loudly into the night she caught the hand of her enemy in his next attack and twisted him aside to collide with the last of the four thugs. The switchblade popped out of his hand and twirled into the air where the young woman snatched it cleanly. Then she bitterly eyed the groaning barely conscious forms around her.

"I shall take this plebeian instrument of mutilation and visit upon your body -"

Kodachi's eyes widened as she stopped her rant cold.

"Megalomania," she muttered haltingly. "I am displaying signs of megalomania."

The switchblade fell from nervous fingers before she moved between the four thugs, kicking them into unconsciousness without further preamble. As soon as the hostiles were handled she turned her attention on her own gloves hands.

Quickly she removed one of the gloves to reveal the smooth alabaster skin underneath. The hand started shaking vigorously as she stared at it.

"My skin isn't green," she whispered in disbelief before her eyes started darting around until she found a storefront displaying her reflection. She darted through the alleyway across the street and virtually pushed her face into the glass. "No, no, no. NOOO! Damn it! I'm human again."

She took a deep breath and forced herself to analyze the situation carefully. Investigating her appearance in the reflection closely, she found herself much younger than she last remembered. In fact, she looked quite like she remembered appearing as a student of St. Hebereke. Forcefully she closed her eyes and stepped back.

"I have time," she reminded herself. "I have time to fix this. I shall not allow this...this setback to divert me. Indeed, this shall be simply a minor...bump in the road for one of my abilities. It is a small matter."

Kodachi closed her eyes shut tightly and clenched her fist.

"Now stop monologuing and get to it," she told herself. Looking up she noticed the fluttering American flag on the pole down the street. Another scan of the area found a payphone. Walking purposefully toward it, she recalled the American emergency services number and dialed it up. "Yes, I'd like to report an attempted mugging. No, the victim seems to have left quite on their own power, but the criminals appear to need a hospital. I am not quite sure of my location, can you perhaps trace in on this payphone? It is about...one hundred meters south of the alley where the ne'er-do-wells are. Excellent."

As she walked back toward where she'd left the thugs, she found them groaning and trying to get back to their feet.

"Oh dear," she noted. "I had thought I inflicted more injury than that."

One of the thugs turned around to look at her dazedly as his vision started to resolve her as the girl they'd just tried to rob. She was shaking her head and shrugging as she spoke.

"Well, if at first you don't succeed..."

"What the fuck are you talking about..."

By the time the ambulance and police arrived there were, indeed, four thugs in need of hospitalization. Despite temptations, she'd managed to avoid dealing any sort of exotic injuries, she didn't want the police thinking this was anything too far out of the ordinary after all.

She watched the proceedings below and waited for the first ambulance to finish loading up the thug with a cop in attendance to keep an eye on them. She traced them from the rooftops of the brownstones for several blocks before taking a leap and landing nimbly on the roof. Flattening herself against the roof, she held on through the snowy night air until the ambulance came to the unloading bay for the emergency room.

A leap up took her out of the line of sight of the civilians and cops, holding onto the side of the building and taking several leaps upward, maintaining connection between her and the stone facade by use of her chi. Finding an unwatched aperture was more difficult. Fire doors were out of consideration, since she didn't want to alert the facility to anything unusual. It wasn't until she reached the roof that she managed to find an entrance that let her into the building unnoticed. The guard there was a bit more concerned with warming up than with paying attention to someone coming inside.

A discarded lab coat from a locker room near the top floor was pulled over her school uniform. She wouldn't pass most inspections, of course, she looked like a bloody teenager after all, but if she kept her manner to an appropriately busy hustle, most people wouldn't look at her long enough to see that she didn't belong. A far cry from trying to get around in a black school uniform in a country that didn't make much use of school uniforms.

A couple of hours later, she had the tests she needed and was standing beside a sleeping lab-tech covered in black rose petals as she calculated the implications of her two blood tests. The worrisome hormones were building up faster than she expected. Much faster than they had when she'd been a teenager. One hand idly noted down her conclusions on the print out.

"36 hours, maybe less," she muttered. "A day and a half in which to lose my physical humanity before I lose my spiritual humanity. This should be quite...fun."

The sound of an opening door drew her attention and she bolted for the open grate and slipping in before whichever doctor in search of just why their labs weren't getting done came into the room. She was already pulling the vent closed behind her when she heard the voices in the room.

"What the..." this was followed by several footsteps. "Security, get in here. Everyone in the blood lab has been drugged unconscious, there's an intruder in the building."

Kodachi didn't hesitate to slip through the vents and come out in a broom closet before stepping out into the lower levels of the hospital where a few civilians from outside the hospital were still around. Discarding the lab coat, she made her way down stairs and, as an after thought, approached the reception desk.

"Excuse me, I have a question, pertaining to a school project," she said without hesitation to the woman sitting there.

"Oh, what is that?" the receptionist asked with a well-buried trace of negligent annoyance as she glanced up to see a teen and then looked back at her work.

"Do you perhaps know if there are any labs or companies doing genetic research in the area?" she asked. "Who might the best be?"

"We don't do genetic research here," the woman said firmly, now glaring at Kodachi.

"I am quite aware of that," the physical teenager noted, rolling her eyes. "But is there any genetic research going on in this city?"

"Listen kid," the receptionist noted. "Just go look up Waynetech Bioresearch and move on. I have work to do."

"Waynetech," Kodachi noted in satisfaction. "Thank you, that will be most helpful."

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><p>A blonde woman woke up as light streamed in through a window into her eyes. Irritably, she reached up her hand to block out the sun and started to crack open her eyes. She took in the wooden walls with the vaguely Asian themes and tried to place the room in the catalog of locations she was familiar with. Failing that, she lifted herself up to a seated position, noting that she had apparently been sleeping on the floor. She corrected that thought when she looked back over her shoulder and saw that it was a traditional Japanese style futon.<p>

"Okay, what the hell is going on here," she whispered to herself.

Looking herself over she found things even more confusing. There was a kevlar vest under her shirt which itself was under a jacket embroidered with softly glowing runes. Her shoulder holster complete with automatic pistol was securely in place. Hell, even her boots were in place and there was an extendable baton on her belt. A shoulder strap held her preferred assault weapon and a quick check confirmed that her back up pistol and a knife were in place.

All three of the pistols had that warm, reassuring feeling that she wasn't entirely certain of. She experimentally pulled the clip of both the pistols and the security weapon. They were all three loaded, but she had an odd sensation regarding that, something that she wasn't quite able to place.

"Since when do I go to bed in full tactical gear," she wondered before rising to her feet.

This held another surprise for her, the stiffness of old injuries failed to make itself known. Frowning, she took a few moments to perform a few stretches and test out her range of movement. All of her old pains seemed to be gone. A full two decades of fighting gangsters, cultists, fae, vampires, and assorted other supernatural beasties were just...gone. She felt better than she had since before the chaos entered her life. Actually, she felt better, and stronger, than she had ever felt before.

She glanced skyward, imagining herself seeing through the simple wooden ceiling above her toward the heavens. Such renewals never came for no reason. Her only question was whether this had come from the Heavens or some...other force. It wouldn't be the first time that an enemy or even The Enemy had managed to empower one of the angels to turn them against the cause. Of course, that was all supposed to be over and done with. They'd won, she was free to live out the rest of her years with family and friends in peace.

Barring things like this, of course.

"Okay," she said, rolling her eyes. "Let's see where the hell I am."

The door to the room was easy to find and not locked. Given her surroundings, she was in some sort of inn or hotel or something. She just hoped her room was already paid for. The hallways were narrow, like something out of older times, but at least she had no difficulty finding the stairs. She was passing down them easily enough when the sound of raised voices came up to her ears.

"...are you seriously trying to give us lip, you stinking cur?" someone with an almost inhuman guttural voice asked. "Don't you know who we are?"

Moving cautiously down the steps, she lowered her profile as much as she could so that her eyes would pass below the lower floor's ceiling quicker and give her a look at what was happening. Eventually, she came around the corner to find a pair of dark-clothed men pressuring who she assumed to be the innkeeper. One of them was tall and standing with his back straight and his arms crossed, a wicked smile across his face as his partner leaned over the bar and gripped the target of his intimidation by the throat.

"My brother and I are missing nin," the leaning man noted. "We're in the bingo book with a price on our heads enough to buy this stinking pit four times over. So if you don't want to end up adding to my bounty, just stay the fuck out of my way."

The woman frowned as she listened and understood what was being said, but yet the language was unfamiliar to her. She wasn't hearing English, that's for sure. It sounded a bit like Japanese but that wasn't quite right either.

As she pondered the matter, she let the personal security weapon slip to her back and pulled out the heavy auto-loader from her shoulder holster, making sure to set the safety off.

"Shinkichi," the tall man noted with cool amusement. "What did you have to say that for? Now they'll head to the nearest Hidden Village with word of our location." He tsked and shook his head.

The other man growled thoughtfully, looking over his shoulder. "Hmmm, guess we'll just have to kill everybody then."

The blonde woman set up her pistol and loudly pulled the hammer back. "I wouldn't do that if I were you."

The shorter, more bestial sounding of the men in dark clothes didn't even bother to turn and face her before moving to throw something in her direction. She recognized the movement coming easy enough and immediately set to rolling out of the way while still taking her shot.

A kunai imbedded in the wall behind where she had been perched as she rolled down the stairs. Her own first shot spiraled across the intervening air before slamming hard on target into the shoulder of the man that had just tried to skewer her. Instantly he started crying out and clutching the shoulder, but the blonde woman was already lining up another shot on the taller man, whose arms were uncrossing.

Her second shot was immediately followed by two more which struck center mass and pushing the second target back towards the wall. Or they would have if the target hadn't vanished into a puff of smoke to be replaced with what looked like a light fixture.

This wasn't her first rodeo by a long-shot, she'd been decoyed before and she immediately launched donkey kick backwards. Her foot connected with the wall, she'd figured that it would be too easy to assume that she'd hit the ninja. Still, this gave her the chance to propel herself forward over the last flight of the stairs, taking a flip in the air as she glanced back to see the tall man launching a near stream of metal pointy bits in her general direction.

This was part of why she'd kept low to the ground in her dodge forward. In her experience, you didn't jump through open air unless you had to. It was a terrible idea to be caught in mid-air, no way to redirect your movement, when the monster, or stream of bullets, came for you. This was no different, she kicked out toward the nearby wall and redirected her leap to the side, adding in her weight to push her out of the line of fire. Though one of the kunai dug a painful gouge into her her arm, it was mostly a flesh wound.

Rolling to her feet, the first of these thugs, the one that she had already shot, came back into the fight wielding a short bladed sword in one hand as he pushed into the fight. The man was fast and hardy to be fighting with a bullet in the shoulder. It didn't take her long to categorize him as above-human level in strength and speed. He was, however, effectively slower than an Einherjar. She took a simple step to the side and let the strike pass her buy, adding a bit of momentum so that he went flying into his partner.

As the man toppled away from her she leveled her pistol and fired twice. When she was a rookie, she would have tried for the non-lethal strike, but too many years of fighting monsters had taught her otherwise. She'd given these two a chance by announcing her presence and presenting the firearm. They hadn't hesitated to attack, so she wouldn't either.

One dead body toppled into the living body of his teleporting partner, weighing the tall man down. The blonde woman approached, drawing the knife from its position as she walked over the body and started to slice down for her enemy's neck. A puff of smoke revealed to her a chair in the man's place and her pistol pointed back over her shoulder and with the pull of a finger, the second ninja shuddered to a stop, hole in his head before toppling to the ground.

Standing up to her fully unimpressive height of five feet, the blonde woman looked about the room, gun and knife at the ready as she took in the civilians around her. "Everybody all right?"

"Uh, yes, Ma'am," the innkeeper said hesitantly.

"You've got anything like police around here to deal with this?" she asked.

"There's a place to turn in bounties a few leagues down the road," the innkeeper told her shakily. "May I ask, wha...what manner of weapon is that?"

She looked at her pistol and then the man. "Never seen a pistol before?"

At the shake of his head, the woman grimaced. Apparently she'd just wasted a fair amount of ammo in a place that didn't know what a pistol was. Taking the weapon back out, she removed the clip to take account of what she had left. What she found was a full clip. The frown grew on her face and she walked outside and looked for a good piece of dirt. She had a suspicion which she wanted to test. If she was wrong, she was about to render the pistol little more than a hunk of metal until she could get some tools to make her own bullets.

Pointing down, she fired repeatedly into the dirt until the pistol clicked to empty. She counted fifteen shots in doing so. Then, removing the clip, she looked at it and saw bullets filled to the top. Immediately, she pushed the clip back in and fired another round of fifteen bullets into the ground. Once again, upon removal, the clip was full.

A sensation dragged her attention to the cut on her arm which, as she watched, visibly closed itself. Her eyes narrowed as she considered that. Last she knew, she wasn't anything other than human, so where the hell had that come from.

"Okay, Toto, this is definitely not Chicago anymore," she said as she noted the various people staring at her.

Once again, the pistol was holstered and she looked through the small clusters of people to find the innkeeper. "Hey, where am I?"

"This is Sonoda Village in the Land of Fire," the innkeeper said quickly. "Uh..."

"Murphy," she responded. "Karrin Murphy." She walked to the door and looked in at the bodies of the two ninja.

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><p>The explosion woke her up in time for her to roll to the side before a large piece of the ceiling could crush her flat. Eyes darted about taking in the battered nature of her surroundings. The building she was in was old but sturdily built with signs of regular maintenance. It was most likely some sort of hotel or bank building. Nameplates that she could see told her that she was in an English speaking country of some sort. The repeated explosions told her that there was something of a war going on outside.<p>

Another round of explosions convinced the young woman to stand up and get moving. A quick look at the back of her hands found a disturbing lack of scars there, but she shoved that out of her mind as she shoved one of her long ponytails out of her face. Her priority right now was to get to some degree of safety and then establish just what the hell was going on.

A stairwell took her down two levels to find the rest of the stairs blocked by a collapse and forcing her to head into the main portion of the building. She found herself in a long room of office cubicles with a wall-sized window looking out onto what was almost definitely New York City.

"Bank then," she reasoned as she picked through the scattered light weight furniture looking for another stairwell to proceed down from.

Her search for a way out was interrupted when a humanoid shape of red and gold metal literally rocketed past the window pursued by a number of figures on some sort of flying bike contraption. One of the vehicles was clipped by something and came hurtling in through the broken window and crashing in a headlong tumble through the debris on this floor and forcing the young woman to dive off to the side and avoid the main thrust of the crashing vehicle.

As things settled down, Rin peeked up to see the pilot of the flying bike: a strange figure in biomechanical armor of some sort. Three-fingered hands gripped a weapon that it pulled from the wreckage of its vehicle as it shook its head clear, finally fixing eyes on the young woman in her black skirt and red sweater. An inhuman shriek erupted from its insectile mouth before it started to raise the wicked seeming item to its shoulders.

The girl wasted no time in pulling her hand up and pointing toward the figure with an outstretched index finger. Reddish light immediately gathered at the tips of her fingers before rocketing out and pounding into the thing's armor and knocking it off center. It was only the first such shot fired, however, as a cascade of the reddish bolts of energy erupted from her finger into creature. Each moment coming with her advancing with one calm step after another.

As the inhuman thing was blasted by her, again and again, the girl frowned. The thing in front of her was no threat, but her magic felt somehow...different from what it had originally been. At the very least it felt stronger. Her spell was not drawing so heavily on her magic circuits as she was used to it doing, even when she were younger and hadn't passed the crest on to her child. A thought which came to her about the same time she realized that she could still feel her family crest where it had been implanted around the time of her father's death.

Curious, she pushed the last projectile as far as she could and felt her eyes widening further and further as she seemed to be tapping into some oddly limitless pool of prana. She stopped well before she reached her limit, afraid of what might happen, and watched the unleashed spell slam into the target. Both the creature and the very wall and floor around it dissolved with a speed so swift that it seemed like they were being torn apart by a physical blow rather than simply an overcharged disease charm.

"Where'd that come from," she wondered, eyes narrowed, as she approached the new hole in the floor and looked down to the next level.

Dropping down, she noticed for the first time, that her physical condition was also far better than it had been of late. Walking along, a shattered mirror attracted her attention out of the corner of her eye and she paused to look at herself in it. Some might have taken the following minute or so of examination of her smooth skin and dark hail to be something of vanity. Most would have missed the analytical, calculating expression behind her eyes as she considered the fact that she had someone returned to her physical condition of thirty years prior.

"I should be careful if I don't want to acquire a sealing designation," she commented, "and with this situation, I should definitely be on the look out for any Enforcers on the way."

The sound of a number of cries from further on along her level drew her attention and motion to a door at the far end of the debris. Stepping out, she saw a crowd of people being held under the gun point of several more of these inhuman things. The non-humans were talking amongst themselves in that shrieky, gutteral language as the girl considered her options.

She recognized preparations for a mass execution when she saw them. She'd been on both sides of the equation before, after all. Exterminating a horde of mindless Dead Apostles for one, and facing the Einzbern's assassins when they tried to prevent the dismantling of the Grail. She couldn't stand idly by and watch a bunch of mundanes be slaughtered.

Her plans were cut short, however, when a man in a red, white and blue uniform barreled in through the window and proceeded to beat the hell out of the inhuman creatures with a shield and his fists. The short fight culminated in the man taking shelter behind his shield in the face of an explosion from what the girl assumed to be a grenade of some sort. He was sent hurtling out of the the window by the force of the explosion while his opponents were simply vaporized.

The girl narrowed her eyes again in thought as she moved down from her place of observation to the level where the fight had gone on and then down to the ground floor. Pushing through the crowd of people she came out of the doors to see the uniformed man standing up seemingly unfazed at having just landed on a car. All around there was chaos as giant serpentile monsters and more of those flying bikes darted about the air.

"This is not my reality," the girl noted to herself with a grim tone as her eyes finally found the great black hole in the sky out of which these invaders were pouring.

She looked to the side as a number of police officers started working to herd the civilians out of the most dangerous areas of town. Slipping out of the way she dipped into an alleyway out of sight and watched for a few moments before moving on deeper into the war zone.

Whatever was going on, she wasn't going to be pushed aside like a civilian. If nothing else, she'd be able to stay on hand and watch things develop to get a better idea of what was occurring.

Slipping from one end of the alley to the next, she watched as a flying blond man with a hammer cascaded one of the monster things with lightning. Hugging close to the walls, she paid close attention to the vast amount of power that the man was tossing around with seemingly little effort. There was a...feeling about him that told her that he wasn't human as well. Her first thought was that he was a Servant or something else, but dismissed that almost immediately. She'd had way too many close-up...inspections of a Servant to think that this person was one of those.

She paused at the corner of a store and considered things for a moment. "Though Saber really isn't your standard Servant, now that I think about it."

Regardless, she started to turn a corner and then ducked back around as she saw a full unit of those invading things picking their way cautiously down the street, probably looking to flank the defenders of this city. She took a deep breath and considered the sort of spells or tactics to use. She had limited resources here, no jewels to use as power sinks, no Saber, no Shiroh. Just an unknown source of power with unknown limitations and unknown consequences.

"Well, I wanted to stay close to the action," she reminded herself. Taking a breath she turned the corner and spoke aloud in a confident voice. "Heed the Contract and Serve Me, O Queen of Ice! Come, Everlasting Darkness, the Eternal Glacier! Bring Death to All That Has Life, Eternal Rest! End of the World!"

The entire area ahead of her was covered in a sheer, glittering of framework from the moment she started speaking. The ice only grew thicker and colder as the spell continued until, at last, the incantation was complete and the girl was standing in front of an icy grotto of frozen fingers. She lifted one hand, middle finger and thumb pressed together.

"Shatter." She snapped and each pillar of ice shattered, sending pieces of alien warrior all over the scene and flying past her.

Brushing back her hair, she started to move confidently through the carnage that she had just unleashed, pausing only when she took in the sight of one of the storefronts she was walking past. Idly, she paused and considered the scattered jewels and gems on the floor of the shop in front of her.

"On the one hand, I don't like the idea of adding 'jewel thief' to my resume," she considered, cupping her chin before raising her index finger and considering on with the contrary point. "On the other hand, I am in an alien environment for an unknown amount of time. Best to have some sort of resource on hand."

It didn't take much of a spell to overwhelm the few remaining security features of the store, then it was just a matter of stepping in, finding a discarded purse to empty and gathering a handful of gems to fill it with before stepping back out again, eyes open for creatures or police officers directing civilians out of the area. As soon as she had the time and quiet, she could get to work on enchanting the jewels for later use.

She continued picking her path through the ruins of the city, moving closer to the tower over which the portal hung. Her forward progress was stopped for a moment, however, as she heard a groan coming from nearby. Twisting about she looked over and saw someone trying to push his way out from under some debris. Glancing from the portal to the young man, a high-schooler likely, she grimaced and moved swiftly to the young man's side.

"Hold still," she told him. "I'll get you out of there."

"How are you going to..." the young man asked.

"Just, hold still," the girl repeated, outright commanding this time.

She reached back to pull out her athame and found herself instead holding a particularly familiar jeweled dagger as a memory came to her mind. A long night of work at the end of decades of study resulting in...this. She put the distraction into a different fragment of her mind and decided to deal with that later. For now, she simply cut her finger slightly and reached down to pick up a piece of the debris surrounding her and the young man. She marked the piece of debris with her blood and watched as the pieces of shattered building rising up into the air rejoining the structure above the young man pulling off of him.

"What...what the hell was that?" the young man asked as the girl leaned down next to him and started looking him over. "Who are you?"

"My name is Rin Tohsaka," she said. "Now stop squirming so I can get this over with and back to my own affairs."

Above them, the portal closed tight as the invaders and their weapons all started falling out of the sky.

"Well, that's now moot," she said with palpable irritation. "So, back to this. Stay still or I will make you stay still. I swear, I prefer healing the unconscious and dying, it's easier."

* * *

><p>A purple-haired woman stepped out into the hotel hallway, looking casually in either direction as she started to walk towards the back of the hotel hallway. She'd almost made it before the cart came around the corner and she found herself tumbling over it. It wasn't particularly difficult, especially with a restored youth, though she did spend a couple of moments chiding herself for the lack of awareness that made it necessary.<p>

"Oh my goodness!" a woman shrieked as the purple haired woman landed on her feet and straightened up. "Are you all right, Miss?"

"It is fine," the young woman said, turning around. "I landed on me feet."

"That is so lucky," the woman noted. "I should have come around a little bit wider, I always take the corners too tightly and people don't get enough time to see me coming and – oh my God, you're blind!"

That statement confused the young woman somewhat and her brow crinkled. "I'm what?"

"Well, your eyes," the woman said, embarrassed. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have blurted it out."

The woman smiled then and shook her head. "Don't worry about it, it's a family trait. It can look disturbing, but I'm not blind."

"Oh, you're not," the maid asked. "Really? Are you certain."

"Quite certain, yes," the woman said with a gentle voice. "Other wise I couldn't say that you have brown hair and blue eyes."

"Oh, well, I suppose," the maid said. "Still, I should be a bit more careful. I mean, who can see through walls, right? Other than Superman, of course."

"Superman?" the woman asked in confusion.

"Oh, he's a character in an comic book," the maid said. "I guess they don't have that book in your country."

"Oh, I suppose we are a little bit distant from the place," the young woman agreed casually. "I'm actually rather surprised to find the speech and writing so easy to understand."

"Where are you from, anyway," the maid asked. "Somewhere in Asia I guess, but I can't quite place the accent."

"That's quite some distance from here, yes," the purple haired woman commented before quickly moving on. "Excuse me, I was trying to reach the roof for a better look at the city. Do the stairs here lead up there?"

"Yes, the heliport is up there," the maid said. "That has a good view of the city, but it is a bit chilly out there. Winter seems to come earlier and earlier each year. I mean supposedly the world's supposed to be getting warmer, right?"

"That's what they say," the woman agreed conversationally. "Well, thank you for the information. Now, if you excuse me, I want to get the lay of the land here."

"Oh yes, no problem," the maid said, "Let me just get out of the way here Miss..."

"Uzumaki Hinata," she responded. "But I believe the proper term in this language is 'Mrs'."

"Umm, aren't you a little young to be married?" the maid asked before her hands came to her mouth. "I don't mean to imply anything."

"It's all right," Hinata returned. "I look young for my age. Anyway, I'll be heading up to the roof then."

"Maybe I'll see you later, Mrs Hinata," the maid said. "Oh wait, Asia, umm Mrs Uzumaki."

Hinata nodded and turned back toward the stairwell, keeping her smile though it was a little bit strained. She shouldn't be too judgmental, she had been quite awkward herself at one point. Granted she had been a child at the time, but she knew more than a handful of people that had remained awkward well into adulthood.

The air was indeed rather crisp as she came out onto the roof and found what she assumed to be the heliport. She assumed the flying vehicles she saw in the air around the building were the "helis" that used this port, but they weren't exactly the chief thing on her mind as she looked about and then took a casual leap to the top of an antenna affixed to the roof. Once there, she made the hand sign to focus her chakra and send the veins about her white eyes bulging.

The byakugan active, the entire vista of the city became visible to her. She kept her head moving slightly in order to keep the one blindspot she had pointed in different directions. Granted, that was up into empty air along a very small cone, but was never a safe thing to assume there'd be no danger coming from a direction.

In the meantime she spent her effort on memorizing the general layout of the place as much as possible. Major thorough-fares, traffic nexuses and places of gathering power. The first thing she noticed was that the city was rife with power, but none of it looked quite like anything she recognized as chakra. Below her, people were closer in view enough for her to see that their chakra coils were...not exactly chakra coils. Where ever she was, the basic physiology of the people that lived here was similar but different from the people of her own country. Different enough for her to conclude this was some alternate dimension rather than some unknown country half-way around the world from Konohagakure.

The only people she knew of who could manipulate alternate dimensions were all sharingan users. She didn't remember seeing any Uchiha before she'd gone to sleep. Which, of course, didn't mean anything. Someone powerful enough to send her to an entirely different dimension would be able to get around her detection. She didn't use the byakugan all the time after all, especially not in these days of peace.

Before she could figure that out, however, she had to get the lay of the land here. One thing that made this not quite chakra useful was that there were numerous variations to it which pooled in different places. She assumed that this represented various major factions in the area, but the sheer level of power around was disturbing. The last time she'd seen anything like this had been in the Fourth Shinobi World War, with the only major difference being that most of this power wasn't active, it was just...sitting there.

She looked for an area where the various powers pooled together, or at least several of them. She needed a neutral ground, some place she could watch the various powers come and go without drawing attention. One thing she was very good at was sitting, watching and not attracting attention. Scanning about, she found what looked like a bar of some sort. Which brought up another problem.

Money.

But there was always an easy solution to that and all that required was looking for a place where two groups of people were exchanging money for goods in a not so upfront manner and track the party that received the funds to their home base. Then all she had to do was trace a path to that home base from this building she was currently in.

Not more than an hour later, Hinata was sitting on the roof of a much smaller building overlooking a shady seeming warehouse and counting guards, reading lips and listening to the voices of those close enough for her to hear. All the sorts of ammunition she'd need for a good disguise, assuming she let these people see her to begin with.

When she was ready, a chakra empowered leap took her to the roof of the warehouse and a simple hand gesture warped her entire appearance to that of one of the solo guards that she'd seen patrolling the area. Coming through the skylight was easy enough, and she soon found herself walking along the ceiling over the heads of these criminals. She was tempted to simply shut down the entire operation, but reminded herself that this was not her land and she was trying to avoid attention right now.

There was a moment of opportunity and she let herself drop silently from the ceiling down to the ground without anyone noticing her. Now, if she got spotted, they'd simply see their fellow guard and hopefully not question it, something that would be harder to pull off if they hand her walking along the ceiling. Quietly, she took a ladder up to the overlooking catwalk and started her way toward the office overlooking the scene as a whole.

A couple of people, the individuals in charge of this operation she assumed, were sitting around counting the bundles of paper that they had brought in with the briefcase. They were still counting as she brought herself over their position, overlooking a door just behind them. Dropping down, she slipped into the office behind them. She considered whether or not to use the Gentle Fist, without proper study of their alien physiology she'd as likely kill them as knock them out. Or perhaps do nothing. Of course, they were sitting too close together for her to quietly take out one without alerting the other.

She glanced up toward the ceiling light and retrieved a simple needle from her pockets. A simple throw and the chakra-infused needle struck the lightbulb, causing it to suddenly sputter and shatter, burying everyone in darkness.

"Damn it, I just changed that light bulb," one of the two men in the room with her noted. In the dark she noted one of the two standing up and moving toward the next room with the sort of slow care produced by trying to move around when one can't see. It was a behavior she was familiar with only from watching other people having obviously never had much trouble seeing herself.

"Maybe there's something wrong with the wiring?" the other man suggested from where he sat. "Just get it working so we can get this finished, then call an electrician in."

"Right, right," his partner noted. "Where's that flashlight."

As the man continued looking for a replacement bulb, Hinata came up behind his cohort and quietly secured her transformed arm around his neck. The man struggled for a bit but he was well and truly unconscious before a light appeared in the side room.

"Found it," the man declared. "Now for the light bul..."

The light tumbled out of his hand to floor as Hinata slipped in to choke him unconscious as well. Moving quickly now, she turned to the piles of paper money on the table and rolled out a scroll from her pocket. Outside, she could see several guards getting concerned about the goings on in the office. She could even hear questions about what the light was doing out.

"Hey, is everything alright up there?" someone called out.

Making sure she was clear of cameras, Hinata shifted her hands and transformed again, taking the form of one of the two men she had just taken out of the situation. "The damn light went out, don't worry about it."

"All right, boss, but if you need any help, we can," the man outside continued.

Inside, Hinata, within her disguise, was biting into her index finger to draw some blood and complete the seals to place the money into the seal scroll. "No, there's no need for that, just stay out there. Make sure no one gets anywhere close to this money."

"Right, boss," the thug outside noted. "You can count on us."

As the minion spoke, Hinata was rolling up the paper scroll and pocketing, along with all the money it now contained, aside from the bills that went into her pockets for easy access. She waited for the guards to once again stop paying direct attention to the office before slipping out the side door and leaping silently up to the roof. From there she easily made her way to the skylight and then was out into the city at large.

Perhaps half a mile away, she activated her byakugan and focused back on the criminal warehouse. As expected, there was something of a commotion going on as her victims woke up and started demanding answers from the thugs guarding the warehouse. Angers flared, and Hinata found herself lucky to see the use of one of the odd weapons of this world demonstrated. One of the bosses pointed the piece of metal at one of the thugs and pulled a lever. The projectile it released moved too fast for her to track, perhaps a sharingan user could do it, but it tore through the body of the target and quickly the man's chakra, or whatever it might be called here, faded away with his death.

"Well, this is good distance to be at one learning how that works," she said to herself as the commotion continued on. She let the byakugan drop and started on the path to the bar she had seen earlier. Some miles out, she let her disguise drop and returned to her true form. Eventually, she found herself walking down a small flight of stairs into McAnally's Pub.

* * *

><p>Amongst several customers in the Japanese internet cafe was one redheaded young woman sitting at a computer in the back corner with a fair-sized overnight bag beside her. Her attention at the moment was focused on the computer screen, though her back was to a wall giving her a good view of all the entrances into the building.<p>

She'd woken up earlier in an unused sewer facility that looked like it had been converted into a sort of headquarters some time in the last twenty years. She'd found some old skeletons, mostly children, which had been there for an unknown period of time. Not exactly the most comforting of places, it sort of felt haunted in a way, though she knew her usual working partner would scoff at such a superstitious analysis.

In any case, she had decided to come up to the streets to start working out just what had happened so that she woke up in Japan looking like she had in her twenties and easily able to walk. Hence why she was now sitting in the back of the internet cafe. A little bit of hacking had done the job of getting her into the public computer and set-up with an account status that had her as paid in full. After she finished her research, she was going to see about building herself a bank account and identity. This was normally rather criminal stuff, but she didn't exactly have much choice.

After all, when she'd tried to access her own bank account she'd found that it didn't exist. Nor did the company she had banked with for years. In fact the entire city and county where she had spent most of her life simply seemed to not exist anymore. Or ever, in fact. It wasn't as if her hometown had been wiped off the face of the map. It had been wiped off the face of history.

With that stumbling block making itself a nuisance, she'd moved on to studying her current location. It was a Japanese city that she had never heard of before, but then she didn't know everything about everything. She simply never forgot anything. The fact that a city wasn't one she had heard of meant nothing more than that she hadn't heard of it. That said, it had all the characteristics of a city which would have made it into her friend's files at some point and she knew those files inside and out.

Interesting as the history was, with mentions of notorious hired killers, serial killers and mysterious explosions, it wasn't quite telling her how she could have appeared in this place and how her old injuries had been healed and her body made younger. Though the more she researched recent history and current events, the more she felt there was similar pattern developing now.

Though the authorities were trying to keep it quiet, she'd gotten into some of their files and found reports of various missing persons or "gas leaks" explaining cases where multiple individuals had either died or been placed into a coma. It wasn't just the general nature of authorities trying to keep panic down, however, there was a lot of active cover up going on above and beyond the efforts of the local police offices trying to make sense of unusual events.

The powers that had covered up the events ten years ago were acting now to cover up and conceal the current situation. There was a sort of paranormal event going on. There was no public admission of the existence of things like the meta-humans she was familiar with, but she was finding lots of evidence that things like that, or maybe beyond the average she was familiar did exist.

She had to assume that her presence here had something to do with the paranormal situation developing in the area now.

That decided, she worked at building herself a quiet bank account and laundering the funds so that she could get herself a bit of working capital. Finishing that, she checked to see if there were any feelers out trying to track her hacks. There was a bit of activity on some of her trails, but they weren't close to locating her yet. Shortly before closing the connection, she set off a process to lead her trailers on a continuing wild goose chase.

She picked up her bag and walked out into the daylight.

One thing that hunting the criminal element gave you was a firm grounding in the techniques of those criminals. Techniques her mentor had used to great effect at times, often going incognito as a gangster himself. Her primary focus had always been on computers and hacking, but sometimes things just had to be done in person. There was, fortunately, an immigration office on hand and lightly manned. The computer security was also lacking and easily penetrated, which was why her worm had such an easy time triggering a gas leak alarm at the desired time.

She watched from her position as the building was evacuated, slipping in during the chaos and making for the appropriate office. The information and approval for the card had already been filled out and waiting for her command to make her appear on the files and print the ID. All in all, it took her more time to walk to the office and out again than it did to print the new ID.

There will still other IDs to arrange for, passports, drivers' licenses and the like. Currently she was giving herself a Tokyo address and a security consultant's certifications. She'd crafted enough false identities for her comrades and mentor over time, she knew how to handle all the small details that would come up.

She had the ID in hand when she walked up to the counter at the bank with a smile on her face. "Hello, I'm sorry to be a bother, but I need to report a lost card and withdraw some funds."

"And the name, please?" the teller asked politely.

"Gordon Barbara," she answered, handing over the card.

"Just a minute, Gordon-sama," the teller told her. "If you could wait, please?"

"Not a problem, thank you," Barbara responded.

The rest of the day was spent collecting the computers and gear she needed to rig an ad hoc Batcave for the near future. Once night fell, out came the old work gear.

Barbara held the hybrid Kevlar weave reverentially for a few moments. It had been a long time since she'd taken up the mantle of the bat. Even before the Joker had shot her, she'd retired from active field work. The woman had been Oracle for so long that she quietly wondered if she'd lost the feel for field work.

Mission command was a very different task than field operative.

More than that, however, there was a sort of electric feel to the costume now. That was the only way she could describe it. It felt very much as if by taking on this mantle again, that she was accepting the will of her comrades. Beyond that she felt as if she was being watched by…something lingering in this place. Something that was waiting to see what she would do. She half thought that the light around her was dimming save just a small circle immediately around her.

"Please, Barbara," she muttered to herself, eyes still fixed on the costume. "If Bruce could hear you now, he'd be chiding you on falling for superstitious nonsense."

Taking a deep breath, she stripped down before pulling the armor over her body. Lastly, she pulled the cowl up over her head, concealing her red-hair. She was in Japan and would stand out as a foreigner even in the costume, so she added the air-filtering mouth cover and slipped down the flash lenses to cover her eyes. Then she started arming herself.

Everything in place, she felt a thrill of anticipation pass through her. She rather wished she had a mirror on hand to check everything.

"Well, Cassandra, take a break," she whispered. "The original is back on duty. Now let's see if I still remember how."

A few minutes later she was at least confident that she still had the hang of using a grapnel launcher or the glider cloak. Her first errand tonight was to check out one of the gas leak sites and do her own investigation of the area. She was looking for something in the nature of the paranormal, there was nothing else to explain what had happened with her. Well that or this was all a hyper real dream. It was better to assume super-human powers and be on the look-out for it than to assume a dream and be unprepared.

She reached out with the grapnel toward a tall building, the reconstructed Hyatt Hotel, with the intention of adding a bit more momentum and sweeping past it, a shadow through the night. That was before the heat sensor function of her lenses alerted her to the individual in dire need of medical attention within one of the rooms.

Twisting in the air and refiring the grapnel, she pulled herself to the top of the balcony on the victim's room and immediately pulled herself inside. It was a European woman with red-hair and dressed in a business suit of some sort. One of the woman's arms had been brutally removed and Batgirl was surprised that she wasn't already dead.

She didn't hesitate to drop by the woman's side and retrieve the limited bandages her first aid pack had. Alfred had given them all training on combat medicine, and Bruce had supplemented that with his own training on dealing with pain and first aid. Sad to say, this was not the first time she'd performed triage an involuntary amputation. Nor was it the messiest job she'd ever seen, she could thank Killer Croc for that.

"Bastard took my command seals," the woman muttered quietly as Batgirl started applying pressure to the wound and bandaging it.

"Hold still," Barbara spoke, her voice coming out of the filtering mask with a sort of electronic distortion. A finger to the side of her head started her communications array searching for the local emergency band. "Reporting an assault at the Hyatt Hotel, tenth floor, suite…" she glanced around before finding some sort of labeling. "Ten-sixteen. Subject is female, Caucasian."

"We receive that, may I have your name please?"

"The left arm is severed and she has lost a lot of blood," Batgirl continued without responding. "Triage is being attempted, but she doesn't have much time. I'd say the assault happened…" She looked around, scanning the room. Without a Batcomputer, she didn't have a full detective vision active, but she still had her training and her memory. "…within the last ten minutes, possibly as long as fifteen."

"Paramedics are on the way," the dispatcher noted. "Please state your name and unit number."

Barbara simply disconnected from the frequency without answering.

Aside from noting the signs of a struggle, she noticed a few other things as well. There were signs of some sort of ritual though they had been erased as much as possible. Out in the hallway she could hear the sounds of feet coming off the elevator in a hurry. Most likely the emergency dispatch had informed the hotel's own medical staff. Barbara tied off the bandage she was working on and wrapped another layer around before standing up and making for the window.

Someone must have caught the tail end of her exit because as she turned about, she caught the sight of someone coming to the balcony to search for movement. Taking that into account, she angled her body to take her path around the far-side of the hotel and out into open air, gliding to a graceful landing atop a closed department store some three or four miles away.

"Well, today is turning out to be a little bit strange," she decided.

* * *

><p>At first she thought that nothing could have been more surprising than waking up apparently in a Japanese town. That was before stood up and watched a rather worried looking panda running by pursued by a rather bizarre menagerie of pursuers. There was a white duck, wearing glasses; a black piglet, with a bandanna; and a red-haired girl in Chinese clothes.<p>

"Damn it, Pop, get back here!" the red-head demanded with a fervent agreement from the duck shortly before it veered up and unleashed a small stream of sharp knives after the panda.

To her amazement, the panda produced a sign from somewhere, [Why are you chasing me? It was the Master who drank the water.]

"Yeah, well the Master ain't here," the red-head snapped. "And you and Tendo are the guys that hid it when it was damn thank you for the rest of us!"

[Hey, I fought too,] the panda retorted.

The red-head picked up a momentarily surprised looking black piglet before winding up and launching him through the air. "Yeah, you fought on the wrong damn side!"

The woman standing there watching this simply shook her head as the pig took on a determined and angry appearance before twisting into something of a flying kick pose. Then he struck the back of the panda's head. The observer rubbed at her eyes and shook her head, wondering if she'd been hit extra hard in the head at some point.

The unusual scene of violence and vengeance passed around a corner out of her line of sight. She turned to the side, starting to get ready to leave the area when a light brought her attention to a hand mirror lying to the side in the abandoned lot. Curiosity got the better of her as she walked over to pick it up and take a better look at it.

Her eyes widened as she caught sight of the fading images of the battle in New York when the Chitauri had first invaded so many years ago. Immediately, she started examining the mirror, looking for signs that it was some sort of recording device. In doing so, her fingers brushed over the surface of the mirror and sunk briefly through the surface. In her surprise, the object slipped from her hands to the ground below before shattering. When she picked it up again, the image of her past was gone and the reflection of the mirror had turned foggy.

"Normally when we come across potential alien tech, it's a lot more durable," the woman complained.

Bending down to pick up the item, she looked about again, figuring out which direction she wanted to go. She'd pass on the mirror to other people who could toy with it to figure out what it was. Her eyes settled on a chiropractor's office which showed signs of having been closed for some time. Getting inside was easy enough, as was proving that utilities and phone were apparently still paid up on the location.

Picking up the phone she dialed a number and waited for the line to pick-up.

"The number you have dialed is not in service, please hang-up and try again," the phone relayed after several warnings about international calls.

Undeterred, the woman continued to speak. "SHIELD Operative, Code Name: Black Widow."

The phone simply responded by repeating the same automated message. To which, an irritated red-headed woman glared at the hand-set before putting it back to her ear and repeating again. "I say again. This is Black Widow checking in."

The third time that the phone gave her the standard automated message, Natasha took it as proof that it wasn't a glitch in the security program and that the number really was out of service. She hung the phone up and started to walk about the small clinic. She didn't particularly have a reason to do so, but with nothing else to do, investigating her current location was at least something to keep her occupied while she considered her next step.

Coming around to the front, she found a small pile of mail dumped just inside the front door and picked some envelopes off the top of the pile. Finding a utilities receipt, she didn't hesitate to open it. It took very little time for her to note something of interest: the date.

"1987?" she said to herself, checking the paper for any signs that it had aged significantly. Finding none, she turned a closer look to the state of the facility and especially the tech that was present. It wasn't too much of a benefit, unfortunately. There wasn't much in the facility that could be considered very tech-heavy.

Finding a seat, she sat down and stared at the broken mirror. A little bit earlier, she had seen Thanos's Chitauri invading Earth for the first time through that glass.

"Time travel?" she wondered out loud. "Is that even possible?" With all the other weirdness she'd seen over time, she could accept it. On the other hand, this could be some sort of Hydra mind game meant to get her to reveal secrets.

Pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration she let out a long sigh and tried to remember any SHIELD assets that would have existed in this time period. Not the easiest thing in the world given that she was barely a toddler in '87. She didn't exactly feel confident about walking into the local American Embassy and identifying as SHIELD either.

The youthful image she held one of the several mirrors she passed did not surprise her or draw much attention. Age had always been something she hadn't really had to worry about. Rogers wasn't the only one who had a bit of enhancement. She just didn't talk much about hers.

With a long suffering sigh, she stood back up and picked up the mirror on her way out of the chiropractor's office, making sure to lock up on her way out. No sense in attracting people's attention with an unlocked door. Once outside, she started simply walking as a way to clear her head and also avoid staying at one place for too long.

Her simple walk did not remain simple for too long, however.

"You there, hold!" a voice declared. Natasha at first kept walking but the woman, girl really, persisted. "You with the red-hair and Western clothes."

With a sigh, Natasha stopped and turned around to face the speaker. "I'm sorry, I didn't at first realize you were talking to me. What do you need?"

"I have heard tales far and wide of a warrior of flame-red hair and the skills of a demi-god," the woman explained. She was a foreigner like Natasha, that was for sure. Her skin was dark and she had an improbable shade of green hair. Natasha placed her manner and accent at somewhere from central Africa. "I seek to test my skills against this powerful warrior."

"I think you have the wrong person," the Black Widow protested cautiously. "There was another red-head I saw a while ago, maybe you mean her."

"The trollop who was pouting for free ice cream?" the woman demanded. "I think not. My cousin described a red-head of ample bosom, masculine manner, stubborn disposition and offensive attitude. Certainly you do fit the bill most appropriately."

Natasha arched an eyebrow as she looked down at her chest to start and looked up as the girl continued to pile on less than flattering descriptions. "Okay, listen, kid, I am not going to get in a pointless challenge fight with a teenager."

"Are you then a coward?" the woman demanded before smirking. "I suppose even after facing gods and monsters that a dragon would be too much for you."

"How…" Natasha started to ask a question but was cut off by continuing monologue.

"Nay, do not bother to mention my cousin," she declared. "He has only the barest traces of the bloodline of a True Dragon as stolen by the cursed tribe he is heir to the rulership of. You will not find me, Nomusa, such a pushover."

"Are you kidding me?" Natasha asked under her breath, not really expecting an answer. "All right, what is the nature of this challenge then?"

The girl paused and looked confused for a moment. "You have done this before have you not. I can see you carry yourself as a warrior."

"Not particularly," Natasha responded with an irritated expression.

"But my cousin said that you had had many such challenges," Nomusa protested. "I was expecting you to know the protocol for this."

"Look, you've really got the wrong person," the Black Widow noted. "I'm not even supposed to be here. I'm not even sure how I got here. I'm more of a soldier than wandering warrior taking on challenges and such like that."

"You are Ranma Saotome, right?" Nomusa asked.

"Not my name," Natasha protested. "Heck, I'm not even Japanese."

"Oh, well…." Nomusa looked around, somewhat deflated and kicked at a pebble in front of her looking rather dejected. "This is my first martial challenge…so uh…I'm not sure where to go from here. I mean, Cousin Herb said that Ranma would either be a red-headed young woman or a black-haired young man depending…"

"She's a shapechanger then?" Natasha asked, momentarily amazed at how casually she said that.

"Jusenkyo curse, I think," the green-haired "dragon" snorted. "Not a true shape-changing ability such as I have."

"Right," Natasha said. "Well, I've never been anything but female, so you've definitely got the wrong person."

The sound of someone clearing their throat attracted the attention of both women, who turned to see a tall man in a tatty brown gi with a dark mustache standing there holding a barrel or keg or something. "Excuse me, have you seen a panda being pursued by a…"

"About two hours ago, yeah," Black Widow noted irritably, just trying to avoid getting further entangled in conversation. "They were heading that way."

The man nodded and turned in the direction that she pointed. "Hold on, old friend! There's still some left, the schools can be saved."

Natasha rolled her eyes and turned toward Nomusa again, she opened her mouth but was interrupted when a shriveled midget of an old man appeared out of the sky to land on the back of the man in the tatty brown gi sending the keg flying into the air.

"Damn you, ungrateful student!" the old man demanded. "What are you doing stealing my…" he was interrupted as he looked between Nomusa and Natasha. "Pretty ladies!"

Natasha winced at the suddenly lecherous attitude of the old man and stepped back away from him almost simultaneously with Nomusa, who was heading in the other direction. That sort of put her into the arc of the flying barrel, but that was easily side-stepped. The wooden container came down beside her with a wood-splintering crash that showered her in irritating splinters and harmless water.

Or at least, she thought it was harmless water. Almost immediately after covering her face to keep any splinters out of it, she felt her civilian clothes tightening uncomfortably. As she watched, a crestfallen look came over the face of the old man as the sensation came to a close. Likewise, Nomusa was pointing with her index finger, an expression of rage coming over her face.

"What the hell just…" Natasha paused in confusion as she realized the voice speaking her words was male. Looking at her hands and body, she could see quite clearly that her feminine body had given way to something on the other side of the gender divide. "What the hell?"

"I see, a young man with black hair," she said. "So then, you sought to deceive me! Coward! You shall not get away from making a fool of a dragon!" The green-haired girl started to rise up in the air, hovering somehow as her dark skin started to grow somewhat scaly and the eyes began to glow with a pale, greenish light.

"You need a time out," Natasha snapped angrily, tossing a small disc out that contact Nomusa's shoulder and proceeded to send an intense charge of electricity through the girl causing her to convulse in a manner that would have been humorous at another time.

As the charge came to an end, the shocked girl, figuratively and literally, gave a weak whimper and collapsed unconscious to the ground.

Then Natasha pointed toward the man in the brown gi who was trying to sneak out of the area. "And you need to tell me what the fuck was up with that water. Before I use something a lot less friendly."

* * *

><p>"Okay," the woman at the monitor said, turning to look back at her superiors. "We've successfully tagged six splinters for observation. They've been successfully diverted to non-native realities."<p>

"I hate just sitting back and watching," the blonde woman in the dark suit noted with a frown. "I'd rather be in there investigating myself."

"We're still not sure how this phenomena spread from reality to reality, Ma'am," the woman at the monitor reminded her. "We need to find out what's causing it before we can determine it is safe enough to send anyone into the quarantine zone."

"I know," the blonde noted. "It just feels…wrong. And please don't refer to them as 'splinters', these are people."


	2. 36 Hours (Kodachi)

Nearly twenty young men and women within a room surrounding a holographic display that was shifting on different axes according to the commands given. Six separately colored regions were being focused on or pulled back to show them surrounded by a region of empty darkness. Overlooking the situation was a woman with long blonde hair wearing a dark uniform. A severe expression sat on her face as she watched the holographic display shift from one point to another.

"Enforcer Harlaown," one of the monitor crew asked. "Can you come look at this?"

The blonde woman walked over and stood behind the monitor tech, looking down. "What is it?"

"This one isn't investigating the discrepancies between the reality she's in and the reality she's from," the tech said.

"Is she just not noticing the discrepancies?" the Enforcer asked, finding that hard to believe.

"She'll notice something," the tech said, "start to look into it for a minute or two. And then she calls it a distraction and moves on to hunting ingredients to reproduce a mutagen from her...what is it, past life?"

"I prefer not to think about it," the Enforcer noted rubbing at her forehead as she again tried to ignore her distaste for this desperation play. "Whose reviewing the bits of the...past reality we got when we tagged her?"

"Uhh...I think that's a Unison Device," the tech said.

"Given that most of the rest of us age like any other human," the Enforcer noted blandly, "I think it likely it would be a device who could survive the decades it would take to watch someone's life."

"Right," the tech said, embarrassed. "It was...Long Count Record."

"Okay, leave Maya," the Enforcer stopped as the tech looked up at her. "She prefers that name. Leave her a message that we need a summary of any significant information before we get a detailed report. It should take her..."

"She sent a reply already."

"Right, time dilation," the Enforcer noted. "Let's open the summation."

The tech nodded as he did so and a dossier of the woman in question drawing a sharp intake of breath from the Enforcer.

"Her genetic makeup, does it include...?"

"From what I can tell, ma'am, the defect is more severe in this body," the tech noted. "I think we've been seeing her aggression increase already."

"The last thing that reality needs is another omnicidal psychopath," the Enforcer noted with a sigh.

"Ma'am, what do we do?"

"What can we do?" the Enforcer asked. "We try to go in and do something, the anomaly spreads to here."

"Then what are we doing this for?" the tech asked.

"The best case?" the Enforcer asked. "Sending these women into foreign realities gets the residents looking at it themselves, maybe stop it from happening. Get them moving at normal time again instead of speeding toward self-destruction. Maybe it might even be possible to get them aware enough that we can try an evacuation when the next collapses happen."

"And realistically, Ma'am?" the tech asked.

"We're collecting data and hoping to find something to tell us what's going on," the Enforcer noted with a sneer expressing the distaste she had for the position they were in.

* * *

><p>Kodachi stood at the window, looking out at the prominent Wayne Enterprises Tower in the distance. The most realistic strategy was to identify a less impressive genetics lab to infiltrate as her workspace for the night, after locating and acquiring the remaining ingredients that she needed. But she predicted that by the time she what she needed, that it wouldn't be something she considered an issue. She took a deep breath and turned back toward the computers in the library behind her.<p>

"Right," she muttered to herself. "I have the correct roses. I'll need the orchids and a catalyst. Everything else I need should be standard in any genetic labs."

The search functions on these computers were primitive from what she was used to, but then again, when she was a teenager, the internet hadn't even been created yet. Which was another thing to add to the list along with the existence of a Wayne Enterprises or Gotham City for that matter.

"Glorious, there is an actual mamushi exhibit at the zoo," she said with a victorious smile. "Now, let's see if there are any greenhouses specializing in orchids around here...and there are."

The relief was premature, she knew. There was no guarantee that a greenhouse would have one of the sort of orchids she needed. Still the feeling of euphoria rose up quickly enough that it came out of her in the form of a cackling laugh.

"Excellent," she said with a clap as she stood up and found herself facing the stern expression of a woman in her mid forties.

"Young lady," the woman said with a hint of nervousness. "We do not appreciate such...behavior in this establishment."

Kodachi looked on her with a disdainful expression, speaking with a sneer. "Young lady? Do you really mean to speak me in such a fash..." Kodachi stopped, closed her eyes and then opened them again. "Excuse me, madam...I am having a...stressful day."

"That...that is no excuse to behave in such an outlandish fashion," the woman responded. "You'll scare someone."

"That's curious," Kodachi noted. "As far as I can tell, there's no reason for my laugh to be considered anything more than annoying as of yet."

"You must not be from Gotham then," the woman responded.

"It would explain my Japanese accent, wouldn't it?" Kodachi asked, clenching a fist behind her back.

"I think it's best you leave now, young lady," the librarian said, putting her back up again.

Kodachi squeezed shut her eyes again. "You should be careful about referring to a person's age. Especially someone under stress."

"You are dressed in a high school uniform and look barely in your teens," the librarian scoffed.

"That is reasonable," Kodachi whispered as she took a step back away. "That is a reasonable ex...explanation." She emphasized each word strongly as she turned away from the woman and started for the door.

"You..."

Kodachi's eyes snapped open, narrowed and she held up a finger without turning around. "I'm warning you right now, don't say anything else until I am gone."

With a huff, the librarian stalked away and Kodachi walked out the door, pushing herself to stay focused and dismiss the insult as imagined. She pushed down an urge to make even more of a scene than she already had. There was, as of yet, no desire to do anything more than put the fear of the Rose in that petulant woman, but that could easily escalate if she let it.

"That is definitely aggression, approximately equivalent to my early twenties," she whispered to herself in Japanese. "Sense of grandeur is feeling...delusions of grandeur are becoming more pervasive. On the plus side, I never even thought to argue myself down as a teenager or 'tween'. Perhaps the self-awareness will give me a bit more time than my original calculations."

She got down to the base of the stairs of the library and stretched out. "Of course, if I'm already to the point of degradation of my early twenties after a little more than ten hours, then I have...maybe two...three hours before I kill someone unnecessarily. That's plenty of time."

The Rose shook her head and grimaced wishing she could tell whether the last sentence was sarcasm or another delusion before she took a tight corner and leaped up to a dark ledge, turning to watch the sun approaching the horizon in the distance.

* * *

><p>A twenty-seven year old Kodachi walked into the room, eyes on the central display where a vine grew along a white trellis, displaying a batch of beautiful white roses. Her eyes twisted down to the plaque describing it as a Jincho White Rose.<p>

"Such a bland, plebian color," she commented. "A complete lack of thorns. I find it difficult to believe that this tame...thing is what has won the honor of being the Kantoshiro Reward this year."

"What would you choose then?" a man next to her asked. "The Kuno Rose? That's the only other contender. All the other projects had...mysterious setbacks."

"The Kuno Rose is a wildly beautiful creation, full glory and native power," she protested. "And it has numerous applications beyond simple decoration."

"It's deadly poison," the man scoffed.

"Poison is relative," Kodachi retorted. "A dilute sample of what you call poison could have a specific curative effect. That is what medicine is, after all. It is a use of poisons in a hope that what ails us will die before we do. Poison is an art of precision."

"Wait, you're Kuno, aren't you?" the man said in a moment of realization.

"Yes, yes I am," she said. "I suppose this might change your opinion..."

"I think I shall take my leave," the man said angrily. "I have no wish to share air with a psychopath."

"Psychopath?" Kodachi asked as the man left the room and she followed. "Psychopath? How dare you speak to me like that? How dare you?!"

Kodachi caught up to him easy enough, being that the man, whoever he was, had nothing in the way of martial training. She landed on a ledge overlooking his position as he continued to stomp off in a huff. Still the brief trip allowed her to consider all the various complications that would come with her plan. Not that she was all that worried about such things as the police, but she'd rather not be bothered by them.

Fortunately, she had something more...poetic in mind than simply killing the man or making him vanish. She took out a handful of petals and blew them down over the man, watching him push them aside without looking closely.

"I've wanted to test this particular species," Kodachi noted with a broad smile as she proceeded to shadow the man below her until he reached an apartment building. With every step, his anger growing hotter and hotter. All it took was a triggering event and then she was able to watch as blood was shed.

* * *

><p>In the present, Kodachi shivered and pushed the memories out of her thoughts as she dropped down to the street and joined the groups of visitors heading into the Gotham City Zoo. She turned idly to check the hours and noted distastefully that they were having extended summer hours with lighted exhibits lasting past sunset.<p>

Kodachi grimaced as she came up to the gates, pulling out some of the cash she'd taken from the thugs that tried to mug her earlier. The woman behind the cash register smiled as she walked up. "Welcome to Gotham City Zoo, I hope you'll enjoy your visit."

"Shouldn't you be closing?" she asked. "Sunset is coming within an hour."

"We've been having some extended hours, tomorrow we'll admit people to watch the fireworks display," the woman explained.

"That sounds as if it would be quite hard on the animals," Kodachi noted with distaste. "All the lights and activity have to disrupt their natural cycles quite badly."

"I think there have been some funding problems," the woman said quietly, looking around.

Kodachi frowned and nodded. "I see."

She turned over the money and walked through the gate into the park on the other side, making straight for the map and locating the reptile house. Given the warm, breezy weather and the fading light, she found the reptile house only lightly populated. Her eyes kept drifting to the exhibits to admire the beauty of the creatures, but even so it didn't take her long to find what she wanted.

The man in the uniform was clearly one of the experts as he went about checking the exhibits himself. She checked over her shoulder for a moment as she reached into one of her hidden weapons pockets to draw out a simple black rose. She tried her best to keep herself from putting a charming smile over her face. In her experience, her smiles tended to disturb people more than be taken as charming.

"Excuse me," she said casually. "I'm curious. Might I ask you a question."

"Certainly, miss," the man said, turning to look at her. "What would you like to know?"

"Do you collect the venom from the exquisite collection of serpents you have here?" she asked gesturing broadly toward the various displays.

"Well, yes, of course," the man noted. "There's a lot of use for the venom. Making antivenom and other such researches."

"Indeed," Kodachi noted, bringing her rose around and up in front of her face. "And would you currently have any unprocessed mamushi venom?"

"Actually, the female was milked just today," the man noted, looking just the littlest bit suspicious.

"Excellent." Kodachi took a breath and released it lightly over the top of the flower, directing it towards the man. He coughed for a moment and then his eyes started to glaze over. "I need the mamushi venom. About 50 ml. Now, hurry along quickly, before you fall asleep."

"Right, let me get that for you, miss," the man repeated with a slow, dazed nod as he walked off toward the back of the building. She walked a few feet to the side and stood in front of the mamushi display watching the serpents in their stillness, replacing the black rose into her uniform.

The mamushi wasn't the most beautiful of serpents in her opinion, she had rather an appreciation for the colorful North American coral snakes in that regard, but it at least was not so ugly as many of the rattlesnakes on this continent. What the mamushi did have was a nearly unique combination of neurotoxins and hemotoxins. In this one creature, nature had done most of the work for her in the creation of the catalyst for insuring the BR-mutagen was efficiently relayed to her genetic code.

The drugged snake keeper only took a few minutes to return, though he was already starting to nod off as he walked toward her and held out the vial of venom. "Here you are."

"Thank you," she responded. "You're doing the world a favor. Of course you won't remember any of this when you wake up." She pulled a notepad and a pen out of the man's shirt pocket and jotted down a few instructions on it before sticking the notepad back in his pocket. "That should help alleviate the side-effects tomorrow. Enjoy your sick day, though I suppose I may have just cost you your job."

She waved and started to walk away from him as he toppled over, breathing shallowly.

"Well, that was a painless acquisition," she declared.

A moment later the sound of gunfire and screams cut through the sounds of people enjoying a night out at a local attraction. A look of annoyance crossed over Kodachi's expression as everyone else around her took on various expressions of fear and concern toward the door leading outside as they tried to huddle out of the line of sight of the exit.

Kodachi didn't break stride in her walk, hoping that she'd be able to get out in the open before whatever thugs decided to secure the reptile house for more loot. As she walked, a voice started coming over the loudspeaker.

"Greetings to the patrons of the Gotham City Zoo," the man declared, "the absolute perfect one-stop shopping place for all the very best pets."

As he spoke, the door in front of Kodachi opened, admitting a man wearing a clown face-mask and bearing a fully automatic rifle. She didn't pause in her stride, already within striking distance of the man. He bore a lethal weapon, and his body language spoke of none of the training that any legitimate authority would require before giving a military grade weapon to someone. Everything about him stunk of the street and raw greed.

Her hand slipped out, chi working to open the Hidden Weapons pocket in her sleeve and drop a club into her hand. The slender tool whipped across the man's throat, crushing his larynx in a single motion. She idly shouldered past him, drawing out her ribbon as the man clutched at his throat and reflexively pulled the trigger a couple moments before collapsing.

"Unfortunately, it seems there's been something of a mistake," the man on the speaker continued, "because it seems some of the pets up for viewing already belong to someone. Me," there was a low, sinister laugh...almost infectiously cheerful actually. It made Kodachi want to laugh herself actually.

"Ohhh-hohohohohoohohohoho!" she cackled herself. "You really think such amateurish weaklings can stand against the Black Rose! Well then..."

In any case, the gunman she'd dispatched at the door of the reptile house had friends. Her ribbon lashed out as the club folded back into its place. The ribbon cut through the rifle of the nearest thug, and into his body and with a flourish through the throat of the next thug. Then it was swirling around her, rising a cloud of dust and debris drawn up by her chi to cover her leap to a higher perch on one of the gothic style arches of the zoo.

"Let's see how you do," Kodachi noted. "Oh my, it seems I've killed you all. I am so sorry, perhaps I should have given you the first move. But then, that's not in the nature of the Bla..."

She stopped, and snapped her mouth closed, growling as she realized she'd reverted to her younger nomme de guerre. Not to mention her accusation of them being amateurs while she started engaging in the posturings of her youth and insanity, which was beyond being merely an amateur.

Glancing around, she decided the reptile house was clear for the moment and moved to a new position. She made her way toward the front of the zoo and made an analysis of the situation.

"Now, I don't want my poor little babies to be without me for the festivities tomorrow," the man declared. "So I thought I'd come and take them off your hands...and maybe take off a few hands for that matter."

The individual thugs were of minimal capability, though perhaps some raw practical experience in surviving. They were deployed rather expertly however, and there were quite a few of them. Blood Rose could handle them easily, as could the Black Rose, though her methods would likely have been needlessly vicious. As it stood, however, she wasn't the one and was actively resisting becoming the other. In addition, she rather had doubts about her ability to deal with the man behind the PA system.

His insanity was palpable and the Black Rose portion of her personality had already fed on it. It was in her best interests to simply leave and hope that the civilians here would be safe. She gritted her teeth and already knew the answer to that.

"What's this?" the man's voice behind the PA declared. "It seems someone isn't interested our little party here. Now, whoever could it be? It's just a tad more blood shed than I'd expect from the Bat...unless, hmm, could it be that you're starting to see things my way out there, Batman?"

Batman? Kodachi wondered. They thought her to be some...person known as the Batman?

"What manner of insult is this?!" she wondered, eyes virtually flashing as she started to reach for another tool.

She stopped herself and shut down the bitter, senseless rage that she felt for this strange man's distant conclusions. She moved to another perch closer to the exit of the zoo and stopped, staring down at a pack of the thugs holding guns over a crowd of men, women and children. She took another look toward the exit and hesitated. Leave, or do something for at least this group of civilians.

Though she didn't know why she should concern herself with a bunch of sniveling commoners...

...and that was why she had to do something.

Quietly, she counted up the men she was faced with and considered the pros and cons of a direct assault. It was a delay and she knew it. There were five men, and given the tactics available to her in this body, no matter how she approached, there would be civilian casualties if she tried to do things the direct way. Unfortunately, most of her tools were not exactly of the covert nature. She had her roses, which would either incapacitate the hostages as well, or else would require her to get very close, practically in the enemy's face.

She didn't have a way to handle this that was both swift and acceptable.

"I need to get on to the orchids, not hang around here worrying over..." Stopping and taking a breath, she continued. "Secure the children first."

Kodachi moved from an arch to the top of a tree, minimizing her weight as much as possible before allowing herself to drop through the top of the tree into its branches. Walking along a thicker branch, she came to just above one of the thugs and knelt down over him before twisting about to hang upside down from the tree with a rose in her hands.

"Well, Bats?" the voice over the PA asked. "Is that you? Or do we have some other party pooper dancing around our little affair?"

As the man spoke, she smiled darkly and waited for the thug to turn about before blowing on the rose in her hand, sending its petals and pollen into his face a moment before pulling herself back up into the tree. Behind her, the man felt his muscles seizing up in moments, as he saw a shadow of the girl that had incapacitated him leave and move for another target.

The urge to laugh and declare herself floated under Kodachi's thoughts as she padded her way from one tree to the next, putting herself in a position to take out the next target. Behind her, the paralyzed thug near the youngest hostages was just barely toppling over, to the surprise of his captives. The sound attracted her next prey's attention along with that of the others.

"What the hell, did you trip?" one of the other three thugs asked as he started to move in that direction.

The thug beneath her seized up as a club touched the back of his neck and an electrical current was dispatched through his body, locking down even the muscles required to scream. Unfortunately, that did nothing about the civilians around him that reacted with shrieks as the man suddenly toppled over with a faint burning smell.

"Well, whoever you are," the PA voice declared. "I'll be setting up some little surprises for you since I rather expect you to be coming this way. After all, you can't really count on the police can you?"

"Hey, get out of the shadows or we'll..." the thug had started to point his weapon at the hostages, but failed to finish as a ribbon whipped out to grab him about the neck and then pulled him back into one of his remaining two fellows, leaving them toppled in a pile.

The last thug turned around with his rifle taking aim at a teenaged girl in a black school girl uniform redirecting the ribbon as he started to aim. A grim look in her face as she noted that he had a bead on her and would be able to fire before she could do anything to get out of the way.

"Well, at least the Black Rose won't be making a repeat appearance," she thought to herself.

And then the sound of a low flying aircraft roared over the scene. Kodachi didn't see the make of the aircraft, but it drew her enemy's eyes upward away from her. In that instant, she tossed a club outward and drew back in her ribbon. As the last thug dropped to the ground, her eyes tracked a shape in the darkness descending with speed and then gliding out over the area.

"I would suggest that you flee this place," she declared without looking at the civilians, pointing toward the gates, "and do so quickly."

She waited for the civilians to flee, looking back into the zoo and wondering what she had just seen.

"Ah, there's the guest of honor," the PA voice declared. "I'd know the sound of that wind-breaking anywhere. Well, then, we can deal with this other interloper later, I suppose."

Kodachi's eyes narrowed as she eyed the entry gates and started to walk towards the staff box and where she expected another PA box would be. She was holding the handset before she realized it, but stopped short of speaking making a statement.

"I don't have time for this," she whispered heading off into the night.

* * *

><p>Batman stepped into the zoo office standing among the unconscious forms of the Joker's thugs as he untied the hostages. He eyed the radio, now smashed, that had been hooked up to the PA system.<p>

"Wh...what did he want?" the head zookeeper asked.

"Someone apparently sold you his hyenas," Batman explained.

"Those two?" the man asked. "We were going to put them down. They'd savaged another of our hyenas."

"Well, they're not your problem for now," the Caped Crusader noted. "I'd suggest you head out to the police."

"Right," the man said, gathering up his subordinates and leaving the area.

After he left, the Batman reached up to his ear and tapped the side of his cowl. "Gordon?"

"I'm here," the man said. "Are we lucky enough to say you took in the Joker?"

"I'm not sure he was even here to begin with," Batman said. "And Harley was out with the hyenas before I arrived on scene. They didn't waste anytime. This is looking like just their way of making us aware they're in town."

"Typical of the damn clown," Gordon responded. "This is just his opening line."

"There's something else too," Batman said. "Joker wasn't the only one here."

"That's all we need," Gordon said. "Any idea who?"

"Witnesses at the reptile house suggest a girl, late teens," Batman said. "She left three of the Joker's men dead there. And one civilian unconscious via some kind of drug. Curiously, she left treatment instructions on a notepad in his pocket. Also, some black flower petals."

"That's interesting," Gordon said. "There was an incident at Gotham East Hospital. Someone drugged a lot of lab workers to sleep and left black flower petals scattered around."

"What was she doing there?" Batman asked.

"She ran blood tests," Gordon said. "I assume you can get access to the information."

"I'll look into it and get back to you," he told the old cop before cutting off the communication and connecting to another frequency. "Oracle? I need you to look into something."

* * *

><p>Kodachi snarled as tossed aside a plant that, while beautiful was both too mundane to pique her interest and worthless to her own purposes. This was the third greenhouse. Third! And all of them had been useless to her. Every single plant. Bitterly, she started to reach into her pocket for a certain seed packet. She stopped herself though.<p>

"I need that virus," she told herself, firmly. "That's for me. Nobody else. That's mine."

She took a deep breath and smoothed out her uniform, regarding it with a disappointed sigh. At some point she needed to get some proper clothes. But she'd wait for that until after she had some time to alter the clothes, put in hidden pockets here and there. Things that she wouldn't lose access to if her chi was disrupted the way Hidden Weapons was.

In any case, there were still some greenhouses to check. She was running out of time before the deadline she'd set for herself came up. The idea of allowing herself to simple fail in a task that she had set for herself was outside the realm of allowed reality. The Rose tossed back the hair over her shoulder and strode for the shattered door, walking out into the streets before leaping up for the rooftops.

"Now, let's see where was that next address?" she commented. "I believe it is somewhere over in this direction."

The dawn was breaking before Kodachi came to the next location and found it just barely open and ready for business. She landed down in front of the building and turned to look over her shoulder towards the surprised man standing there and starting to head for the shop.

"Take your business elsewhere," she instructed casually. "I desire no interruptions as I conduct my affairs." She turned her back on him and started walking to the door.

The surprise on the man's face turned to a look of anger and annoyance. "Listen you little bitch, I need to get my wife some flowers."

As the insult carried to her ears she stopped and felt a sneer come over her face. She felt a voice deep in the back of her mind repeated some statement. It was something in the neighborhood of "ignore him, he's not worth it," which felt rather more annoying in and of itself. Ignore it? Ignore an insult to her greatness? Why should she allow such a thing?

"Do you seriously seek to argue with me?" Kodachi demanded, turning about slowly. "I am Kuno Kodachi, scion of centuries of samurai blood, the Black Rose. To think that some common gaijin would think himself equal enough to argue with me? Ohhh-hoohohohohohoho!" She smiled darkly, pulling out her ribbon from within her robes and lashing outward to slash outward, catching the man's leg and then launching him across the street. She continued speaking in casual tone of voice with an undercurrent of maddened amusement. "You are nothing. You bare not heritage nor any shred of natural greatness such as graced my rivals and my love. Remove yourself from my presence or I will gladly experiment to see how long I can take removing you from this life. Run, run now, because it won't be long before this display will not content me."

The man swallowed and darted away, stumbling as he ran past his own car, heading pell mell down the street.

Kodachi turned away from him, resisting the urge to pursue. It was just a distraction from this challenge. She had to complete the mutagen before the time she'd set herself was past. No distractions like toying with fools or investigating the strangeness of this world. She had to stay focused on the return to her truest nature and power.

She pulled open the door and walked in to find a quaint little shop filled with the most exquisite of rarities she had seen in quite some time. Her anger and rage was momentarily dispelled as she looked around the shop with something akin to wonder.

"Certainly this place shall have what it is I desire," she declared.

"Good morning," a woman's voice welcomed her with a drudging tone. "Welcome to my shop. How might I help you?"

"How can such a toneless voice exist in this house of wonders," Kodachi asked as she approached the counter and the woman behind it. "There are plants here for which I have no name. You have no idea how long its been since I have beheld something new."

"You don't look old enough to have spent much time studying things," the shopkeeper noted with fresh curiosity. "But you certainly have good taste."

"I awoke yesterday with somewhat fewer decades on my shoulders and some of my own grace stolen from me," Kodachi explained casually, still not looking at the shopkeeper. "And certainly, I have the most exquisite and elegant of tastes."

"You are not like most of those who come in here," the shopkeeper continued. "Few seem to understand how it is to care for such fragile and delicate things."

"You do not sell such wonders to the common rabble do you?" Kodachi asked in shock and turning to face the shopkeeper for the first time. She found a red-headed woman with vibrant green skin. "Beauties such as this should only be granted to someone worthy of them. Botanists, horticulturalists, scientists. Ohhhh-hohohohohohoho! Let the commoners be happy with their daisies and lilies or their tame, thornless roses. Save this...for those who truly understand."

"I'm afraid that I have little choice," the green woman noted. "I have something of a history that would keep many from trusting that what I sell them would not kill them."

"Ahh, tsk," Kodachi noted with a shake of her head. "Indeed, it is only the truest of connoisseurs that can appreciate true deadliness. I do remember the men that sought to put down my poor Midorigame. The cowards struck while I was away from town on business operating under some court order in reference to a dangerous animal. It wasn't as if the poor thing had actually killed anybody."

No, she'd just fed it a body or two. There was a bitterness behind that thought that momentarily mystified Kodachi.

"What brings you to my door?" the green woman asked.

"I find myself in need of a particular sort of orchid," Kodachi explained. "Or rather an extract of a particular orchid. It is a critical ingredient to a project of mine. None of the other greenhouses I've been to yet have had anything like what I need. It has to be of the lamia family. Parasitic orchids that sample the genetic codes of the trees they anchor themselves to."

"Taking an extract from the plant would require killing it," the green woman noted with distaste.

"Sadly, yes," Kodachi agreed. "But it is the key in creating something else again. Something rather like you, actually, now that I think on it."

"I'm sure someone of your demonstrated appreciation can see why I would dislike to hand over any of my plants to someone who would simply...harvest it," the woman protested.

"Well, Ms..."

"Isley," the woman told her. "You may call me Pamela, if you wish."

"Well, Pamela, would you know of another way for me to get the necessary extract?" Kodachi asked.

"Assuming all you need is that, then yes," Isley responded, crossing her arms. "I can get you the extract without harming any of my plants."

"That would be simply glorious," Kodachi declared with joy. "And what, might I ask, would you require in return?"

"Money would be helpful," she replied.

"Ahh, I doubt the funds I have access to would match such a boon," she said thoughtfully.

"How much do you have?" Pamela asked.

Kodachi paused and recovered the small stack of money she'd acquired over the course of the night by pilfering the pockets of those thugs that had sought to delay her. "I believe that I have somewhere in the neighborhood of $102.37, and that is all."

"Sold," Pamela noted.

"Are you quite certain?" Kodachi asked.

"For someone who so truly appreciates plants as yourself, it is no problem," Pamela said as she walked toward the back of the shop and through a door. She came back some minutes later with a vial of fluid to hand to Kodachi. The apparent teenager took the vial and unstoppered it to draw in the scent. "Careful, that can be deadly."

"I do not fear such poisons or venoms," Kodachi returned dismissively as she restoppered the vial. "And this shall be quite what I need. Now, again a piece of advice. Take this..." she gestured around, "...wonder and hide it for yourself and the worthy. Let the common public have something pretty, tame and commercial. A woman of your sensitive nature will only drive herself mad by letting most men and women have access to such things as these treasures."

"I'll...consider that, thank you," Pamela noted. "Where do you go from here?"

"My next stop?" Kodachi asked. "Waynetech biolabs, I believe. I've been informed they might have the facilities I need to do my work."

"Waynetech," Pamela noted. "You'll want to attend to that before evening. Breaching Waynetech is going to bring some unwelcome attention."

"Yes, such attention is my failsafe, actually," Kodachi said with a smile and elegant wave before she left the building.

* * *

><p>"I understand that Mr Day has been returned to his normal quarters in Arkham," a cultured, British accented voice noted as he walked through the half-illuminated cavern within which a number of advanced technological equipment sat. "I wonder how he'll celebrate the day's festivities from there."<p>

"I'm more concerned with how the Joker plans to celebrate, Alfred," Batman noted. "Last night, his crews made a raid on Ace Chemicals after they finished with the zoo. They were collecting ingredients that could be used to create his Joker venom."

"I'm assuming since you remain worried that you doubt whether or not you have managed to put an end to his shenanigans?" Alfred asked.

Batman nodded. "It's likely that he already has the venom he needs for whatever he's planning. Last night was just to tell us it's coming."

The butler walked up toward his master's side and looked down at the monitor he was watching arching an eyebrow as he saw a Japanese teenager on the screen. "And who might this be?"

"According to witnesses, she calls herself 'the Black Rose'," Batman noted. "She quietly took over Gotham East's blood lab for almost three hours yesterday. Ran two blood tests noting and comparing hormonal levels."

"Sounds like something that one would typically go to a doctor for, not hijack a doctor," Alfred noted. "What did her tests reveal?"

"Rising aggression, decreasing empathy," Batman noted grimly.

"Never a pleasant combination," Alfred agreed. "Barbara is running facial recognition, I assume."

"And Gordon's crew found fingerprints to run as well," he confirmed. "So we knew the girl at the hospital is the same one who killed three of Joker's men. Then, this morning, three greenhouses reported break-ins." He called up images of the crime scenes one after the other. "This one, the door was left ajar and the sales counter was tossed about, but nothing was taken. In the second the damage was more extensive and the third…"

"Good gracious," Alfred said as he took in the disaster area that the third greenhouse had been left in. "And these store owners waited until this morning to report it?"

"The security systems had been disabled before the break-in," Batman explained. "Nobody knew about the break-ins until about an hour ago."

"You think these are tied in somehow?" Alfred asked. "Due to the increasing amount of violence displayed?"

"It's possible," Batman agreed. "It won't be confirmed until Gordon's crime scene is finished with the scenes. If it is the same girl, she's likely been as careless with fingerprints."

"Sir, if I might make a note," Alfred said, looking at the addresses. "The path displayed by these addresses presents a certain line, and the next greenhouse along that line…"

"Yes, Alfred?" Batman asked.

"Well, the next greenhouse that came along this line would have been Miss Isley's," Alfred noted.

"You're familiar with where Poison Ivy set up her shop?" Batman asked.

"Of course, sir," Alfred noted. "I decided that her effort to walk the straight and narrow would be better if she had some regular customers. Don't worry, Master Bruce, I've run every purchase past Dr. Thompkins' and Mr. Fox's analysis. She's provided some uniquely lovely plants for landscape in the last few months."

"If this new girl raided Ivy's greenhouse," Batman said grimly. "Between this and the Joker, the Batman might have to go out in the daylight."

"When you do visit Miss Isley, Master Bruce," Alfred noted. "Might I suggest hiding your distrust of Miss Isley. In particular, you might refer to her by her name rather than her…more colorful identity. It's likely hard enough for her to make an effort without being reminded of it."

Batman thought about for a moment, the consideration showing in the deepening grimace on his face. "I'll try, Alfred."

"That's the most I can ask, I suppose," Alfred said with a sigh.

* * *

><p>"Isley," a deep voice noted from the shadows, drawing the attention of the green skinned woman moving about the greenhouse.<p>

"Isn't it a little bright outside for you to be up and about," Pamela asked with a clear sign of distaste.

"There was someone raiding greenhouses last night," Batman noted stepping outside.

"And you came to see if it might have been me?" Pamela accused darkly.

"I was concerned that you might have been one of the targets," he corrected her.

"Oh. Well, my babies and I can take care of ourselves, Batman," she reminded him. "You don't have to worry about me."

"I worry about everyone," Batman commented.

She turned away from the business of her vines and looked at him. "I suppose you do. Well, I can assure you, I've had no attacks on my property, and only one customer."

"A Japanese girl in a black school uniform?" he asked. Pamela frowned and turned to look at him grimly. "I'll take that as a yes."

"Are you chasing little girls now?" she asked, turning back to her plants.

"This little girl is suffering from a chemical imbalance and has a high level of martial training," Batman noted. "Given the wrong circumstances, people could die. And I doubt she wants that anymore than I do since the first thing she did yesterday was break into a hospital to test herself for the condition. What did she come here for?"

Pamela hesitated, and thought back to the encounter with the girl earlier this morning. The mention of the girl's failsafe came to mind. "She was looking for the extract from a lamia orchid. A distillation of my blood is close enough to the same thing, so I gave her that. She said she needed it for an experiment of sorts." Crossing her arms, she considered what next to say. "She is…possibly suicidal."

"What makes you say that?" Batman asked.

"She referred to police attention as her failsafe," Pamela explained. "When I last saw her, she said she was heading to Waynetech's biolabs."

"And you didn't report this?"

Pamela turned to glare at him. "Forgive me if I don't show much trust in the Gotham PD, or take the words of a teenager seriously. Is there anything else, or are we finished?"

"Joker's in town, have you heard from Harley?"

Pamela turned coldly away. "Harley is not welcome under my roof while she's with that clown. Last time I made an exception to that rule, I very nearly died. No, I haven't heard from her."

"There are other women out there," Batman noted.

"Pardon me if I'll ignore love advice from someone who can't stop pussy-footing around," Pamela returned snidely.

Batman nodded and looked around the store. "Then I'll leave you to your customers."

"One moment," Pamela noted, hoping to catch him before he vanished. "Someone suggested that I stock more...normal strains for the common customer. Do you have any opinions?"

"You do business with Wayne's butler, don't you?" Batman asked.

"Some, yes," she admitted. "What of it?"

"Who do you think is better to advise you on a business matter?" the Dark Knight asked as he faded back into the shadows and found some exit.

"Lot of help you are," Pamela said rolling her eyes.

Outside, Batman moved up to the rooftops and reached for his cowl. "Gordon, are you still reading?"

There was a delay before the police officer answered. "Yeah, I'm reading. What are you doing still up? I thought you turned to ash in the daylight."

"Following up a situation," he answered. "The greenhouses last night…"

"There were fingerprints at the scene that matched our girl at the zoo and the hospital," Gordon confirmed. "Do you have anything more on that?"

"She paid a visit to Pamela Isley this morning and purchased a rare plant extract," Batman informed him. "According to Isley, she's on the way to Wayne Enterprises. Think you can contact Wayne or Fox and give them a head's up?"

"I could have a full team there in the next ten minutes," Gordon added.

"Isley suggested that suicide by cop might be an issue," Batman warned. "Depending on her mental state, she might not be the only casualty."

"Just what we need," Gordon said. "Okay, I'll brief Montoya and Allen and give the alert to Wayne. Hard to say what he'll do with this information, though. What about you?"

"I'll be working on tracking down the Joker," he responded. "Tonight's the 4th, we may have taken down the Calendar Man, but Joker will likely have something up his sleeve for tonight."

Cutting off the connection, Batman waited for a moment until Alfred's voice contacted him.

"Sir, I have a phone call here from Commissioner Gordon," the butler noted. "I'm assuming you're expecting the call?"

* * *

><p>Getting into the labs had not been easy. Kodachi had to admit that this Wayne Enterprises had secured its facilities quite well. Of course, a determined opponent was capable of getting past any defense. She rather expected exiting would prove to be even more difficult.<p>

Kodachi looked up from her work toward the where the blast doors had been lowered by automated systems. The sounds of security, and most likely Gotham PD, trying to get in past the door still reverberated through the room with regularity.

"I don't suppose there's anybody else who can open the door, is there?" Kodachi asked the two scientists huddled against the wall with their hands and feet tied together.

"Only Bruce Wayne or Lucious Fox could bring down the defenses at this point," one of the nervous scientists explained. "At least without tearing through walls."

"Good," Kodachi noted. "I should have time to finish then."

"What are you making?" the second doctor asked as Kodachi moved from station to station.

"It is a mutagen," she answered quickly. "I've used it before. I am uncertain exactly how it is that I came to this place back in my old human body, but such a container is not truly the worthy to hold the greatness of my being. I am rectifying that mistake."

"You're going to kill yourself," the scientist protested.

"Please, I've done this before, as I have said," she responded. "Do not take it upon yourself to correct me in matters such as this. Be glad that I have no need for guinea pigs this time and know exactly what it is that I am doing."

Her immune system and poison resistance were quite high, enhanced by her chi over years working with various potentially deadly cocktails. She needed to knock it down a few pegs in order for this have any effect on her. At the moment, she was working a time delay coating for the extract and the viral seeds of her own creation. The extract would allow the virus to make the leap from plant to human DNA and infiltrate her cells once the mamushi venom had weakened her system enough. For that matter, if it worked the way that it had previously, the extract would cause some of the reptilian traits to filter in as well.

The last element was her, she would have to meditate, attune her chi appropriately, make her body ready to be changed.

"Of course, on the other hand," she noted. "I will be quite hungry after the change, so perhaps you shouldn't be so relaxed after all."

She didn't want to eat them, of course. Not really. Hopefully it would keep the two bothersome scientists quiet for the rest of the time however. If they were still being troublesome afterwards she could deal with them then.

Finally, the extract and virus had bounded to the temporary anti-bodies and slipped into a solution of the mamushi venom. Filling the injector, she set herself on the floor cross-legged and sent placed the item against the artery in her neck before depressing the trigger. A sense of relief flooded through her as she took a deep breath and tried to focus herself.

Her eyes opened as the security blast door opened up, released by the command of some with the right biometrics on the other side of the door. She watched as a tall man with dark hair and a powerful build walked in, hands displayed peacefully out to the side.

"I assume you're either Mr. Fox or Mr. Wayne," she said.

"It's Mr. Wayne," the man said in a calm manner. "Is it all right if these two leave now?"

"Yes, yes," Kodachi snapped, waving her hand dismissively. "You're disrupting my meditation, take them all away, come back in three hours and collect me then."

Mr Wayne nodded back over his head as some police officers came in to evacuate the two hostages. Kodachi ignored them and closed her eyes again, returning to her focus.

"You're going to have to come with his, Miss," a woman's voice noted.

Kodachi cracked open one eye, revealing a red rim replacing the outer edge of her black irises even as the whites of her eyes were turning green. She took in the police-woman in the red coat and frowned before closing her eyes again. "I'll come with you in three hours. I've already said this. Please don't disrupt me, I need to make sure my body accepts the mutagen."

"Or let me guess, you die," Montoya asked.

"No, I simply fail to change," Kodachi answered sharply. "And that could leave me feeling quite annoyed. So please keep quiet."

"Easy, easy," Wayne said. "Detective Montoya, perhaps you and Detective Allen could remain here to have her under watch here until she's ready to leave?"

"I saw the damage she did on the way in, here," Montoya noted. "She's left eight of your security personnel hospitalized. So forgive me if I don't feel like waiting for her to come out as a full metahuman. She can meditate on the move."

"Continue to disrupt me and you won't have to worry about hospitalization," Kodachi snarled as she shifted her seat slightly and eyed the woman with the gun.

"I have a compromise," Bruce Wayne suggested. "This lab is designed to be sealed off in the case of a biological containment. Perhaps if we seal her in here."

"How would the containment hold up to a metahuman?" Montoya asked.

"It's the same material used to contain Clayface and Killer Croc in Arkham," Wayne explained.

"Sounds like a good bet to me, Montoya," Allen noted.

"Fine, let's back out of this place and seal her in then," the woman suggested.

"If you are through deciding how to cage me," Kodachi snapped. "Then please leave and let me get back to something important."

Stepping out of the lab, Wayne and the police carefully watched Kodachi sitting in the middle of the room and focusing. As soon as they were on the other side, the lab doors started to seal shut, containment protocols moving into place.

"I hope you know what you are doing, Wayne," Montoya said. "We've already got the clown to worry about. I don't want to deal with a wannabe Poison Ivy as well."

"Given she's already made the injection," the businessman said. "I'd say it is safer to let this run its course than to try to interrupt it. Besides didn't you say she's been working toward this since realizing her issue yesterday?"

"Even assuming she started with the desire to prevent herself from going insane," Montoya noted. "What's to say she didn't change her mind and the formula sometime over the course of the night?"

"If that's the case, we have two of Gotham's Finest ready to stop her," Bruce noted. "Anymore questions?"

"Not from me," Allen noted, failing to notice the sidelong look Montoya gave Wayne as he emphasized his last spoken word.

Within the lab, Kodachi quietly breathed in and out until reaching the point when her altering anatomy was able to make the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide on its own. With each passing minute she felt the Black Rose receding. Granted, she wouldn't be able to claim a physical humanity after this, but such was a small price to pay for clarity.

When next she opened her eyes, the change was completed. Standing up she walked to the nearest reflective surface and took in a relieved breath. Closing her eyes again, she focused internally and considered the state of her anatomy. She was nowhere near the level that she had been before, but the potential was there.

Opening her eyes again, she looked around for the intercom and walked toward it. "I believe that I am ready to enter custody."

"Get back against the far wall," the woman's voice noted. "I don't want any mistakes in this. There are questions we need to ask you."

"I have at least one of my own, actually," Kodachi noted. "Are there phenomena capable of travel between time or alternate dimensions in this world?"

* * *

><p>Blood Rose was my oldest running CoH character running from the betas in 2004 to the end of the game in 2012. She was a Dark MeleeRegeneration and eventually worked up her way to Incarnate. I respecced her so many times I was fond of saying that her genetic code was like a Rubik's cube that she kept re-arranging in the lab. Literally every time she earned a respect or my account was granted a free one, I used it for her. Meaning she went through somewhere around 15 or 20 different power and slot arrangements.

That Blood Rose was based on Kodachi though her name was Anno Yumi and she had a quite different backstory. A teenaged suicide attempt with an exotic plant extract mutated her causing her to be kicked out of the family and live on the street. She took up with a tech hero for a time until the 5th Column decided her husband's robotics and power suit designs and her and her children's biology would be good research. She survived and escaped. Later it was determined that she wasn't simply a plant-human hybrid but rather a Devouring Earth creature that had somehow retained her humanity after being infected.

This Blood Rose was deliberately trying to mutate herself for greater power. She only succeeded by age forty one and then started to revert to mid-twenties in appearance. As a side-effect, the mental defects that made her a malignant narcissist and megalomaniac were corrected. She'd already had a large number of death on her conscience and was perfectly fine dealing with that by spending the rest of her life in a top secret prison occasionally getting used for suicide missions.

Hopefully, I handled her progressive degradation in this scenario well. But think the whole thing could have gone a bit better. Oh well.

I think the next chapter will focus on Karrin Murphy…assuming I don't turn to Bystander or other original stuff for a while.

Also…vacation starting tomorrow…yay!

Apparently, Poison Ivy did try to go straight in the Arkham game universe and it did fall through when some cheating husband tried to buy a bouquet from her. I simply replaced that encounter with Kodachi as being someone who would at least momentarily give her some appreciation at the low point instead of aggravation.


	3. Hidden Village Riiight (Murphy)

"What I know about this woman is that she's a standard human from her timeline," a monitor tech noted. "Is she supposed to be operating at such a high level?"

"She comes from a timeline that operates on will, faith and belief more than physics," Enforcer Harlaown noted, "'standard human' can have a rather broad implication. But yes, she's likely operating beyond what she expects as normal. It's most likely the fact that she's conforming to the physical standards of a warrior of her dedication and experience within the timeline we anchored her to."

"It definitely has her thinking, Ma'am," the tech responded.

The blonde woman leaned forward and examined the action on the screen. "Tell me, the guns, are they a natural result of the fragment we used to anchor her in the other timeline? Or are they something we edited in during the cycle reboot?"

The monitor tech paused and turned toward another screen to begin calling up information. "It looks like something we edited in, Ma'am. Simple devices keyed to her personal…what do they call it?" his voice trailed off as he tried to remember the word he was looking for.

"Chakra," the Enforcer told him.

"Right, her personal chakra network," the tech agreed.

The enforcer straightened her back and considered that. "I would note to be careful with that in the future. We could have anchored her to our reality and maybe brought the anomaly with her. Then we'd be stuck in this mess ourselves."

The tech blanched and nodded. "I'll put an urgent note on it right away ma'am."

"At least they will make her stand out more and draw more questions about where she's from," the Enforcer commiserated. "There is that."

"Is she likely to have much success finding the anomaly, Ma'am?" the tech asked. "Even with the chakra network and such, she doesn't have much in the way of dealing with dimensional anomalies."

"You'd be surprised," Enforcer Harlaown noted. "We consider it one timeline, but her world actually includes another timeline. They were being actively invaded by another timeline when this anomaly started. She's lived through a dimensional anomaly already."

"Yeah, but how do you recognize that your timeline is being destructively accelerated when you're inside the acceleration?"

The Enforcer kept quiet, it was her major issue with the plan as well.

"So that's it?" Murphy asked the man behind the counter. "I just turn in a couple of dead bodies and collect some money?"

The concept had her feeling a little bit dirty even as she took the bills into her hands.

"That's the long and short of it," the man behind the counter noted irritably. "Do you have a problem?"

"I guess I don't," the blonde woman said with a frown. "I take it teleporting ninjas are normal around here?"

"Teleporting?" the man said. "That's not all that common…it wasn't in the information in his bingo book entry."

"He kept trading places with objects around the scene of the crime," Murphy clarified.

"Oh, that? That's a basic technique," the bounty hunter noted, rolling his eyes. "It's one of the three techniques that twelve year olds coming out of most academies have to master that to graduate. Where the hell are you from?"

"Pretty far away," Murphy said in the sort of casually vague manner she would have strangled certain wizards over. "Where's the closest authority."

"That would be the Village Hidden in the Leaves," the bounty officer noted, leaning a little bit out of the receiving counter to look vaguely toward the north. "It's about three or four days that way. Follow the road and you shouldn't miss it."

"I shouldn't miss a place called the _Hidden_ Village in the Leaves?" Murphy asked doubtfully.

"That's right, it's one of the five major hidden villages," he told her. "They get lots of business and traffic through there."

"Wait, so there are five major _hidden_ villages which are pretty easy to find," she repeated for clarification.

"More or less, yeah," the man said with a shrug. "Most of the hidden villages are pretty easily found."

"I know I'm going to regret asking this," she said with a sigh. "But why are they called 'Hidden Villages'?"

"Because they're hidden, of course," the bounty collector noted.

"But they're easy to find?" she continued, waiting for the dichotomy to become obvious to the man.

"Well, of course," the bounty collector noted as if talking to a simpleton. "How would they get any business if they were difficult to find?"

Murphy shook her head and pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. "Okay, maybe this is a language thing here. What does 'hidden' mean in this place?"

"It means that something is concealed from discovery, of course," the man repeated in irritation.

"So something that is hidden is supposed to be hard to find, right?" Murphy asked. She watched the man nod slowly. "That's what I thought it meant. So hidden means something is hard to find, but hidden villages are easy to find? Does that make any sense to you?"

"Well…" the man paused and crinkled his brow in thought as he considered what she just said. "You know, I've never thought about that."

"Whatever, I'm done with that," she commented. "You said that's an authority in the area?"

"Yeah," the bounty man said. "I mean, you could go to the Fire Lord's palace, but that's a longer trip and you'd probably just get told to talk to the ninjas in Konoha anyway."

Murphy considered pressing on the issue of what sounded like a bunch of mercenaries being part of the government, but stopped herself and shook her head. She turned her attention instead to the bundle of bills and coins she had been handed and wished that she had a basis in mind for determining how much money it actually was. Given the generally medieval surroundings, it may have been the equivalent of a year's salary for her in the old days. Then again, the occasional bit of tech she saw, such as the closed circuit television cameras in this place, made the local advancement level a bit fuzzy.

Folding up the money and securing it within side a pocket of her jacket, she nodded at the bounty collector and started walking out the door to take up the road. She paused at the entrance and turned around. "Hey, is there a place to eat nearby?"

"I think you just came from the closest village," the man informed her. "Just head back there and get something."

"Guess I'll have to," she said with a shrug. If nothing else, it might give her some idea of how much money she had now.

It turned out that she had quite a large amount of money, based on the reaction that people had to what she had thought would be a modest collection of bills. There was a spark of muttering in one corner of the room that drew her attention, though she avoided actually looking in that direction. Hopefully, that wouldn't be trouble later, but she somehow doubted that she'd be so lucky.

Asking around town, she learned that there were a couple of towns between her and her destination, including an apparently semi-famous hot springs resort. In any case, it didn't sound like she'd be needing to camp out along this trip.

One thing she had to note was that there seemed to be a lot of extremely tall trees all along the road in this region. Walking along she occasionally caught sound of movement in the branches above her taking leaps from one limb to another. At one point in her life she'd have thought it was birds or squirrels or a trick of sound. But sounded a bit too much like something nasty for comfort. The security weapon was held comfortably in her hands rather than be allowed to swing back.

She took another look at the graze from the fight earlier in the day. It was still healing a lot more rapidly than it should have been. As it was, it looked like it had been healing for five days rather than a few hours. Sort of like in those action movies where the hero gets some injury or another in one scene but it barely affects them at all afterwards.

The rustling in the trees around her told her it was time to set aside the self-analysis for a moment. The people stalking her were amateurs. She would have considered them such even before finding herself drowning in stuff way over her head. She lightly flicked the safety off of the security weapon and made sure to clear the chamber.

Typically, she expected even most supernatural beasties to sit up and take notice when she did that. Not everything died to a bullet in her experience, but it did the job on most of the things out there. Of course, here that innkeeper hadn't even heard of a pistol before. That meant her typical posturing to get people to back off before things got too far wasn't going to work. Fortunately, she did seem to be working with unlimited ammo somehow.

Murphy continued walking and waited for the thugs to make their move. It didn't take them long. They moved in a hurry, somewhat nervously. Murphy recognized the furtive looks of criminals that expected authorities to be by at any moment. Given she as on the road to this Konohagakure place, she figured they were worried about attracting the attention of these ninjas.

The tactics were simple. One group of ten thugs flooded into the path ahead of her, bringing her to a stop as another group of about eleven flowed into the path behind her. Looks from the obvious bandits and sounds from the edges of the road told her that at least two people were making a laborious climb into the trees on either side of her.

"Hello there, lady," the largest of the lot started to say. "I couldn't help but notice that you're carrying quite a bit of…"

Murphy didn't wait for him to finish. She turned slightly to the left towards the first of two locations and let fly with a burst of thunderous sounding automatic gunfire that turned the branch one set of potential snipers had been heading for into splinters. All the thugs ahead and behind found themselves flinching and looking for cover in confusion rather than making a move toward her as she swung herself around and served the intended sniper nest on the right side of the road a similar fate. From both directions, she heard the frightened cries of scared rats darting for cover.

Without pause, she ejected the clip, caught it and slammed it back in, clearing the chamber again before advancing slowly and firing a series of three-round bursts into the mass of thugs around her. "Little boys shouldn't try to play with the adults."

Her declaration was broadcast out with an even mix of fury and discipline as she continued walking forward. Murphy heard the sound of the thugs behind her rallying in an attempt to come at her back and she whipped calmly about, walking backwards for a moment. One three round burst obliterated the katana one thug had been raising over his head while another caused the dirt to erupt at the feet of another. That effectively stalled that charge leaving her free to turn around and give her attention to the men in front of her.

"Listen up, boys," she called out. "I'm giving you until the time it takes me to reload to clear out of my line of sight before the boots go on and you start dying in them. To make that clear. I pop this thing out. I pop it back in. I pull the lever and then people start dying."

The thugs looked between each other uncertainly. "We can take her while the weapon is down then."

"All right," Murphy suggested. "The closest of you is more than thirty feet from me, way too far away to have a hope of getting any blow landed on me and your snipers went off to go piss themselves in the woods somewhere. So, if you really think you're ready….here we go."

She popped the clip, caught it, pushed it back into the gun and cleared the chamber. In that space of time, some of the bandits had taken one step forward but most had turned to make themselves scarce. Of those that had chosen to charge forward, she lifted the gun and held it solid, switching back to full automatic before sweeping it across in front of her like a broom. She released the trigger to skip around the fleeing bandits and then twisted back to finish those attacking her from behind.

When it was finished, she reloaded the security weapon and took note of the results. Five of the twenty dead, including the leader. Just like she had reduced the tree branches to splinters, she had practically sawed the advancing thugs in half with her sweep. The torsos and abdomens of the thugs had been reduced to hamburger. It bothered her somewhat that this sort of scene was old hat to her, she'd thought she'd put this down years ago.

"Guess it's like riding a bike," she muttered as she flipped the safety back up on the weapon and bent to investigate the bodies for anything that looked useful.

You went against the monsters and inevitably you found yourself going against people as well. Sometimes they were mind-raped into servitude. In other cases, they were kept controlled by fear or some other means. Fairly often the human thugs were simply just as much monsters as their inhuman masters. It had taken her a while, but her hesitation in firing at people had eventually worn down.

"Probably wouldn't prove near worthy to hold one of the swords these days," she joked to herself, remembering that she'd already proved that at least once and would rather not end up proving it again.

Murphy retrieved some more bills from the bodies as she continued to examine the scene. One thing that she was noting was that her accuracy was astounding. She felt like she was examining the after scene of some action movie fight. There didn't seem to be even one shot that was off target despite the fact that she'd been firing in burst and full auto.

"Lifetime of experience in a younger body maybe," she muttered to herself as she stood up. "Or a lifetime of experience combined with slightly superhuman body. Anyway, that leaves clean-up detail."

Sighing, she began the work of pulling the bodies off to the side of the road and raising a cairn over them to keep the predators out. This was followed by drawing a circle around the cairn to keep anything supernatural out.

Once upon a time, she'd questioned the value of these small rituals that Dresden had passed on to her and the other cops. It wasn't like they were wizards or the like, so she hadn't thought there was much to these things other than a bit of morale and confidence building. She'd seen the simple practices bear fruit repetitively, however, and it didn't take much to make use of them. Now, however, she was doubting them in another way. After all, what guarantee did she have that those rituals worked the same in this place. Even crossing into the Nevernever changed the way magic worked sometimes, and she felt like she was far deeper than any realm or demesne she'd encountered or heard of before.

Not that she was the expert on this stuff.

By the time she was finished, Karrin looked up to see that the sun was riding low towards the horizon. Cursing she shook her head and continued her trek down the road to the next town over. When she did get to the next town, it seemed most of the private rooms had been rented out of the inn already and she ended having to sleep in a corner of the common room.

The next day she reported the dead bandits to what passed for a town official and continued on her trek. The second and third days went much easier than the first. There were no bandits for one thing, and she apparently was moving ahead of the common horde that were renting out rooms. It was part way through the fourth day that she once again found herself questioning the name of the place she was going to.

First of all, the Hidden Village was not a village. It was a fair sized city behind a wall fit for King Kong's island. From where she stood on rise overlooking the village, she could also see a raised cliff-face into which was carved the likenesses of four men. Most of the valley below her was filled with buildings of one sort or another. There were also a handful of billboards, she could make out one in particular that seemed to be an advertisement for some sort of raunchy movie.

Further out from the center of the "village", the buildings became sparser and open land became more common. She couldn't see much of that, however, most of it went around behind the plateau with the carved heads. Likewise, that massive wall continued to circle back out of her line of sight.

It certainly did seem like a seat of authority.

There was a line at the gate when she arrived, with a merchant and his entourage up at the front trying to get cleared to bring in his wares and bodyguards. The man's voice carried back to Karrin quite easily.

"This is outrageous," he insisted. "I demand to be allowed to pass through this instant."

"Sir," one of the gate guards noted. "First we have to inspect your trailer. Then we need to collect a gate fee."

"I've never had to face such an indignity as this before," the merchant protested.

"I imagine that you usually come in via the merchant's entrance?" the gate guard asked.

"I don't have time for that," the merchant protested. "I came here because this gate normally clears entrants much more efficiently."

"This gate is mostly intended for people, not caravans," the guard responded. "I mean look, how do you even intend to get your wagons through the entrance?"

"Once you have finally granted me clearance, then I will head to the merchant's gate," the man instructed.

"And once there, they will want to check everything themselves," the second guard warned the merchant.

"But I will already have clearance from you," the man reported. "So why would I need to get clearance from them?"

"It doesn't work that way," the guard tried to explain. "You have to get clearance from the guards at the gate that you are entering through."

"That's preposterous!" the merchant protested. "Clearance is clearance!"

"Umm, no, it really isn't," the guard responded. "Look, just head over to the merchants' gate and enter that way. It'll take you less time that way."

"The merchants' gate is too slow and they charge an entrance few," the merchant protested.

"Bah, you Leaf have gotten soft," growled the ninja guard standing behind the merchant with his arms crossed forbiddingly.

The man was rather large, maybe an inch or two taller than Dresden and quite a lot bulkier. His stance was good and professional, but not as smooth and balanced as the two slimmer ninja standing in front of the check point and nowhere near the balance or stance of an einherjar.

"Nice to see pompous windbags are the same everywhere," Murphy noted a little bit loudly.

The merchant in question turned to look at her as if she some sort of diseased piece of filth. He took her in and noted her tactical wear as well as her forehead, probably looking for one of those plates of metal that the two gate guards wore. Not finding a headband anywhere, he seemed to dismiss her out of hand.

"Who are you to voice an opinion," he sneered.

The guard behind him also glared back at Murphy. "You're not even a ninja, keep your mouth shut like a good little civilian and stay out of what's your business."

"Yeah, I'm about fifteen people back in line," she returned. "And your idiocy is going to keep me here, so it IS my business."

Most of the other people in line were looking at her as if she had gone insane. Much of the line cleared the space between her and the now fuming ninja.

"If it's your business, why don't you do anything about it?" the ninja guard inquired with a sadistic smile.

"Well I could wait until you finally piss them off enough to take you down," Murphy commented, indicating the guards.

"Like these sniveling Leaf could stop me," the guard protested.

"Oh please, someone like me could take you down no problem," Murphy said with a snort. "What do you think a real ninja would do to you?"

"Really?" the ninja caravan guard scoffed. "You think you can beat me?"

"Yeah, I know I can beat you," she responded before looking toward the gate guards and politely addressing them. "Sorry, is that allowed? I don't want to be a pest about anything."

"Hey, if you want to risk a pummeling to teach this blowhard a lesson, that's your choice."

Murphy started to walk forward as she unslung the security weapon from her shoulders. "Mind watching my gear just a moment?"

"Sure, that shouldn't be a problem," the other gate guard responded with a shrug.

Murphy set the gun down on the table behind them and then likewise removed her primary pistol as well as her knife. She kept the holdout in place and made sure the baton was easy to reach before turning back toward the amused looking caravan guard. "I'm ready, how about you?"

"It's your funeral, woman," the hostile ninja declared with a sneer as he rotated his shoulders and prepared to come forward to her. "Let's get this farce started."

Almost dismissively, the man lunged directly in with a direct punch. Meeting such a blow head on was not Murphy's normal tactic, but at the moment she was looking to test herself. Instead of sidestepping and turning that overbalanced charge into a headlong flight, she reached out to catch his incoming hand and try to force it to a stop.

The tall, bulky ninja was stronger than she was, but the lackadaisical nature of his attack didn't let him fully utilize that strength. When she caught his fist, it took a second or two for her to grind the man's forward progress to a wasted stop. The primary difficulty was keeping her own footing stable and balanced as the man's brute strength pushed her backwards by about two feet. Still, she did bring him to a stop, ending up standing there with a smirk as the caravan guard regarded her with confusion and disbelief.

For her part, Murphy estimated the strength of the man she'd just intercepted to be somewhere more than an einherjar and somewhat less than a troll. She could maybe estimate him to about the level of strong ghoul. The main disturbing thing was that her own strength was somewhere north of an einherjar as well.

"Do you really want to continue this?" she demanded. "Or are you going to be a good little boy and take your boss and his cart to the right place?"

With a growl, the man ripped his fist free and lashed out with a second punch. This time, against her better judgment, Murphy let the blow land. It was painful, rather like messing up in a spar and taking a good heavy blow from your partner. However, it failed to knock her silly or even off her feet. She simply turned aside and tasted blood in her mouth as the caravan guard moved into something like a donkey kick.

The kick was swift, definitely up there in ghoul territory. Unfortunately for him, Murphy had the edge on him in speed and agility. Nor was she a slouch on tactics, she hadn't held on to the man's fist when he started to pull, not wanting to lose her firm stance. Then, by the time he had twisted into a donkey kick, her own heel was slamming down into the shin with the force of an ax kick. She expected the leg to break, but was half-surprised to find the man weather the blow and simply forced down to one knee.

The caravan guard's next attack was even sloppier and more driven by emotion and rage. This time as he lashed out at Murphy, he found himself flying through the air over her head and landing solidly on his back with quite a bit of added force. The wind was knocked out of his lungs even as Murphy began her follow up by twisting the arm in her hands and pulling her opponent into a painful armlock.

"What the…how did you?" the merchant demanded as his guard groaned underneath Murphy. "Where's your forehead protector."

"I don't have one," Murphy explained. "Any chance you'll clear the area now so I spare you the medical bills to take care of this guy's broken limbs?"

The merchant stood there fuming for a moment as he considered his options.

"That's all right," one of the gate guards noted as a young boy also wearing a metal headband came running up to deliver a scroll. "I've got confirmed authority banning him from the city for a period not to exceed five years."

"What!?" the merchant spewed. "That's ridiculous. Why would someone like me be…"

"Just get out," the other gate guard noted.

"Come on then!" the merchant snarled, turning to snap at his cart drivers to turn back around and down the road.

After a moment, Murphy gave one last twist to the man below her coming close to dislocating the shoulder, but not quite going all the way. Then she let go and shoved him toward the merchant. "You should get on too."

One of the gate guards turned to look at her. "Do you need any medical attention?"

"No, don't think so," she responded. "That was just a little bit of a tap."

"Did you find out what you were looking for?" the man asked as she turned to collect her knife and firearms.

Pausing in her action a moment, Murphy turned to look at the man and estimate him before nodding. "Yeah, I think I figured out where a few boundaries are."

"Might I ask who trained you?" the other asked.

"You probably wouldn't have heard of them," Murphy warned.

"You'd be surprised, we're actually fairly well traveled," the first commented.

"Einherjar," Murphy answered. "Among others."

"You're right," the ninja said. "I've never heard of him. Or is it her."

"It's a group," Murphy answered. "Let me get back into line so you can get these people through."

"Sure you don't want to just head on through?" the guards asked.

"It wasn't my turn yet," Murphy answered as she slung her weapon over her shoulder and walked back to her place in line. It wasn't long before the line of people waiting to get in was worked down so that she was back in front of the guards.

"Okay," the first guard noted. "Can I have your name please?"

"Karrin Murphy," she answered simply.

"Reason for visit," they asked.

"Research and consultation," she explained drawing a bit of a surprise from them.

"You're not here for the Chunin Exam?" he asked.

Murphy's brow furrowed slightly in confusion. "I'm assuming that's some sort of ranking test? Why would I be interested in that?"

"Most people seem to think it's a pretty good show," the ninja responded.

Karrin blinked and arched an eyebrow. "Okay. You must have different sorts of tests than I'm used to."

"Guess so," the guard noted. "Well, next question, occupation?"

"I was a police officer for a while," she answered. "Then…I guess crusader is the best description. Was retired until recently."

"You don't look old enough to be retired," the guard noted.

"That is one of the things I want to consult on," she answered. "I figured if you people think switching places with inanimate objects is a 'basic technique' then I might as well just come out and ask someone what they know about supernatural incidents. Since I'm nowhere near my normal source for all things weird."

"I…see," the guard noted. "Any weapons?"

"FN P90 security weapon," she noted holding up the firearm swinging from its shoulder strap. "9mm Glock automatic pistol," she pulled out the primary handgun, "Walther PPK on my left ankle. Ka-bar at the small of my back and an extendable police baton on my belt. All modified in some manner, another thing I want to ask about."

"I have no idea what most of that means," the guard noted.

"If you want, I'll demonstrate at a target range somewhere," she said with a shrug.

The ninja nodded and noted something down on the papers in front of him.

"Okay," the man noted. "Nationality?"

"American," she answered receiving an expected blank look.

"Which country was that?" the ninja asked.

This was hardly the most subtle way to go about this. Dresden must have really rubbed off on her. "I am from the city of Chicago in the State of Illinois in the country of the United States of America on the continent of North America in the Western Hemisphere of the planet of Earth in the Sol solar system at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy."

"I've never heard of any of those places…"

"Well, we're a little bit even," Murphy responded. "I hadn't heard of Konoha or Hi no Kuni until a couple of days ago."

"And you're here to…"

"Research and consultation," Murphy repeated. Yep, Dresden had definitely rubbed off on her. She'd have to thank him for that properly later. "I said that the first time."

*******************************************************************  
>Murphy's perception of her superhuman capabilities are as a result of her being given a chakra network and currently existing under the "limits" of the Naruto universe. Her 25 year old body with a 40+ year old mind produces one heavy chakra potential which translates to essentially super-soldier serum or something in that general range.<p>

Dresden Files has not yet come to an end, so I don't know where it is going.

As to Murphy's behavior, she's mostly tried to avoid killing humans through out the Files (Renfields in White Night not withstanding), but whatever the end result of Dresden Files, assume that the version Murphy comes from pushed her edges a little bit more. In this case, she's still trying to intimidate first and only killing when she deems it necessary. In this case, five out of a little more than twenty assailants were killed, most of the others fled when she gave them the chance.

The guns aren't exactly infinite ammo, they're tired to her own chakra reserves which means it is eventually possible to tire herself to death from shooting, but it would take a lot. The weapons are nowhere near as draining as Nanoha's Blaster System.


	4. Tracking Fragments (Rin)

"Uh, Ma'am, this one is already showing signs of dimensional anomalies," a tech noted.

Enforcer Harlaown looked up from what she was doing walked to the station to see what he was talking about. "Considering these women are all walking dimensional anomalies, I'm assuming that you mean something other than herself."

"Yes, Ma'am," the young woman agreed. "She's operating a minor energy tap. Individually the taps are minute, but she's tapping…well, I'm not sure how many other timelines."

"Are any of them outside the containment area?" the Enforcer asked, concerned.

"As of yet it seems limited to altered versions of her current timeline," the tech noted. "Did we…?"

"No, it's a sub-section to the overall timeline," the Enforcer told her. "Both her original reality and the reality we put her in tend to have numerous such alternates. How constant is this tap?"

"Seems to require conscious activation, sometimes something else taps her," the tech noted.

The Enforcer nodded and moved aside a step or two to run an information search on a screen to the side. "Rin Tohsaka. In possession of the Jeweled Sword of Zeltrech, crafted…almost immediately prior to her world collapsing last time. That's interesting. Just how did we anchor her to that universe?"

"Uhh…" the tech started to say as she searched the databases. "Well, her magecraft is working. Should that be possible? Doesn't her magecraft operate out of some sort of collective unconscious? Should it work outside her reality?"

"That's symptomatic," the Enforcer countered. "That's a result of what we did, not the event it…here we go. Hmmm…that's…interesting."

"What is, Ma'am?" the tech asked, not liking the other woman's tone of voice.

"Somebody decided it would be best to fuse her with what is essentially a fragment of a Lost Logia of that timeline," the Enforcer noted.

"Is that safe, given the anomaly?" the tech asked.

"It...should be."

* * *

><p>The workspace was cursory and minimal. The bounded field protecting it was currently limited and hastily formed. The building itself was rather large but substandard by her experience. It was, however, convenient for her purposes. She could correct its lack of proper facilities later. Under normal circumstances, she'd likely have directed Shirou to attend to such repairs or improvements so that she could focus on other things, but that was not an available option.<p>

Currently, Rin Tohsaka was sitting in a beaten up old chair and observing the various circles and runes she had already raised. The use of the Jeweled Sword, really more of a dagger but that was quibbling, had made it easy to collect the necessary power to empower her defenses without doing so much as breaking a sweat. That was to be expected to a degree. Using the Sword was an application of the Second Magic, and she was apparently on border between transcending magecraft into actual Magic.

There was a different feel to her magecraft right now. It still seemed to be a matter of converting the proper amount of prana into the desired effect. Then some of the laws of the world would be bent toward her desired result. However, the entire practice seemed smoother than she remembered it being. In fact, very little had happened that wasn't within her expectations. What's more Akasha felt somehow…lonely and untouched. It was the only way that she could describe it.

Regardless, she turned her attention the newspapers stacked neatly on the table to her side. The paper had a lot to say about the invasion which she had appeared in the middle of. Apparently the aliens were referred to as Chitauri and that they had been led to Earth by an individual of another alien race called Asgardians. The name of that individual, Rin noted carefully, was Loki.

That of course came to the heroes of the hour, these Avengers. This included Loki's brother, Thor; a piece of information that played havoc with everything she'd ever studied on the Norse deities. Then again, the concept of them as humanoid aliens already did that. The man in the blue uniform was fairly well documented, a hero resurrected from the past sort of like Saber, actually. The individual in the red and gold armor was another well documented oddity and strangely enough a purely scientific breakthrough. The Hulk sounded as if it was some sort of experiment gone wrong. Of the last two members, she could find few pictures and even less information. Of all the heroes, they had the seeming she was most familiar with as relating to the Magi Families: secrets and blood spilt to keep them.

The scientific advancements interested her, not that she was all that interested in technology, but more because of what it spoke to the limits of her magecraft in this reality. Especially if she was, indeed the only one accessing Akasha on top of being able to use the Second Magic through the Sword. Given enough time and resources, she could probably construct a mystic code approximating the Iron Man armor.

"With the full Second Magic wouldn't even need that much in the way of time or resources," she quipped to herself. "For now, though, let's focus on getting home."

Rin stood up, Sword in hand and walked toward one of several circles in this appropriated building. The concept she was employing was simple one of sympathetic resonance. This was not her reality and the Sword could cut across multiple realities. Certainly that could not be a common event in any reality and, after enough years as Zeltrech's apprentice, she'd learned a few tricks about noticing dimensional anomalies.

"The old man is probably behind this event too," she muttered as she gathered herself up.

"Ripples on the calm lake," she intoned in German. "Image behind the mirror. Fallen through the curtains and pressing against the gates. Make gross your subtle bulge and reveal the kaleidoscope shades."

She tapped into the energy flow of the Jeweled Sword, both for the added sample of resonance and the ability to flood the mystery with prana to make it work at a higher level. Almost immediately, an image appeared in front of her starting with a small dot and radiating outward.

"I shouldn't come up with arias while pregnant," she muttered to herself lightly while watching the spell progress. "'Make gross your subtle bulge' indeed."

The appearance of new point of resonance, seemingly not far from her current position, piqued her interest and diverted it away from farther snarky commentary. Then, as the image started to zoom out to cover a broader range, a third dot appeared. That concerned Rin at first, but as the image continued to zoom out, more dimensional oddities began appear.

"Well, isn't this glorious?" she asked no one in particular as she aligned herself with the closest anomaly that wasn't her. "I suppose this is what I get for thinking that this would be easy. I am going to need a more convenient way to detect these anomalies it seems."

The building at the location of the anomaly was quite tall and a brief look into the lobby revealed that it had an impressive number of companies within. She smiled briefly as she considered that Shirou's idea would likely be to question each company about what they do until someone started acting fishy.

"That's rather uncalled for, he's quite a bit more subtle than that," Rin said out loud. "He'd just question the receptionist in the lobby."

The smile faded, teasing her husband over habits he had long since gotten over was not as appealing when he was not around to react. Instead, she turned to focus on the material on the ground in front of her. She recalled teaching her children about the proper way to create a familiar. Magecraft had come to Minaru a little easier than it had come to his sisters, both of whom had been more thoroughly touched by their father's Reality Marble and Saber's inhuman nature.

Apparently, regular prana transfer rituals with a heroic spirit had an impact on the next generation. Who knew? She briefly wondered if the experiment to fuel Shirou's Reality Marble via prana transfer might have been when Ayumu was conceived. That would explain a lot, actually.

"Do they give Sealing Designations for sex games involving nonhumans and Reality Marbles?" Rin idly wondered, trying and failing to provoke a lighter tone.

Rin had walked around the building slightly, placing a gem at each of the four corners of the building, a little bit out from its walls to give her some landing space. It was a very simple bounded field, one meant to divert attention away from the building, even from people seeking to find it and reinforce the people within it. At the moment it was dormant and it would remain so until she triggered the spell that her familiar contained.

Her eyes drifted down to her arm where the Tohsaka crest was on her again, not Minaru. If this was Zeltrech's idea of a test or prank for the student that had finally crafted the Sword from his blueprints, she was going to lay into him. She wouldn't let herself think about the potential that this had nothing to with Zeltrech.

The completion of the familiar cleared her thoughts of those worries and focused her back again on the task at hand. A little bit of concentration and the jeweled bird was rising up into the air and flitting out of her hastily established base and off toward the building across from her own position.

All the signs indicated that most of the offices in the building were going to continue to remain open as the sun went over the horizon. It wasn't all that different from Japan, now that she thought of it. For a moment, she considered the idea of directing the familiar into the building through one of the front doors as someone else entered or exited, but decided against that. Too many people with the chance to see a clearly unnatural flying creature slip into the building.

Putting the familiar to flight once more, she set it to circling the building as discreetly as possible. Her focus was on the windows and what lay beyond them. It was dumb luck that her bird swirled past a window sitting open on the evening sky. Quickly, she had the bird wing its way back and flitter to the window sill. Her bird ducked its jeweled head about for a few seconds, ascertaining an ordinary looking office with a door open out into the general cubicle space. The marketing numbers on the wall made her less than confident that she had found the right company, but at least it was a way into the building.

Taking back to the air, she directed the bird out of the first office and found a perch on a tall set of filing cabinets before someone called walk through and notice the familiar's flight and unusual appearance. It was easy to see that the office was having something of an air conditioning problem. Dress code had obviously become lax and sweat stains were in common appearance on the clothes of the workers still on hand.

"I've just started taking a look," a man's voice came clearly to her from around the corner. "You wanted me to wait until evening to 'minimize disruption', remember? I've barely had time to remove the grate much less get in to look at what might be the problem."

That attracted Rin's attention and she risked sending her familiar winging close to the ceiling over the head of a man coming back with a large cup of coffee. Heading toward the voice, she found what some sort of maintenance man talking to a man in a full business suit and looking absolutely miserable. That was probably the office manager.

"We haven't had air-conditioning all day," the man protested. "You're supposed to fix this sort of thing."

"Sir, again, I've barely been here for ten minutes," the maintenance man reminded him. "This kind of repair usually takes a good while just to diagnose what the problem is."

As the two men distracted themselves with negotiation and argument, Rin kept looking for the open grate for her familiar. She kept her ears on the conversation, listening for the moment when one or the other would give up in frustration and look away from each other. It took her two or three laps, with a handful of stops to avoid the notice of other office employees wandering through the area, but eventually, she took a corner that led her to a stack of maintenance gear and an open ventilation grate.

The jeweled bird vanished into the ventilation moments before the repair came around the corner to get back to his work, a little more irritated than he had been before the conversation with the client.

The ventilation system gave her free access to the building. Or at least most of it. After perhaps two hours of investigating an accounting firm, a travel agency, a publishing house and three pyramid scams, Rin found something of actual interest. The ventilation in some segments of the office building had been blocked off from the rest. It took another hour to settle on the dimensions of the rooms being served by the blocked ventilation ducts.

It was the Northwest Corner of the 5th and 6th floors. Reorienting herself to her own eyes, she looked to the side and checked that against her list and made the guess that the most likely culprits were a company referred to as Advanced Idea Mechanics.

If this were a magus whose territory she was about to invade, then they'd likely have security measures in place to detect the removal of these barriers. Rin assumed that something similar had to exist with a group that had taken the trouble to seal itself off from the rest of the building this way. The question was whether she wanted to provoke a response from them or continue watching quietly.

Quiet observation won out quickly enough and she began to focus her attention on the grates for any sign of an alarm or sigils or anything else of a security related thing. Of course, the duct was woefully lacking in anti-magus methods, but it looked like the mundane security measures hadn't been ignored at all. The plate was welded to the duct work and she could see signs of wiring going into the secured areas.

Setting aside the ducts for the moment, she wheeled the bird about and sought the nearest duct to work open with her carnelian beak. Eventually, someone was going to notice that damage and cost the building owners a small fortune in exterminators looking for rats. But that wasn't her problem.

The hallways were mostly empty, most people having gone home for the evening, and it was relatively easy to find the entrances to Advanced Ideas Mechanics. Getting in was another issue entirely. There was a counter in the hallway displaying a number of decorative art pieces and she landed the bird there, directing it to hold still just like any other piece of art.

Then she waited.

A man on a cell phone rushed out after about thirty minutes, distracted by his conversation and with pulling on his jacket.

"You stay where you are, keep calm," the man was commanding. The look on his face was one of annoyance and frustration. "I'm coming there." He paused in the doorway to finish adjusting his clothes, trying to keep the phone at his ear in the same time.

Rin was momentarily tempted to follow him, but getting inside to look for possible sources of the dimensional anomaly took priority. Taking the line between caution and haste was difficult, but the man's focus at least gave her some sort of cover as she directed the bird to flit across the hallway and into the door as it was held open. She wasn't completely successful at avoiding attention, behind her the man paused on his way out of the hallway to look toward the row of decorations suspiciously. Still, whatever his crisis was held his primary attention and it was barely a second before he continued to leave the building.

The jeweled bird flitted up to a shelf and settled motionlessly like a statue as two people walked into the front lobby from one side of the office to the other.

"I don't know what the higher ups want us to tell them," one man was saying. "This stuff is still unstable. Too many people can't regulate themselves well enough and…"

"Well, everywhere else, yeah," the second noted, nervously looking toward the hallway to see if anybody passing the smoked glass entrance door had heard his indiscrete colleague. "But we've got it stabilized here."

"Only in the lab," the first protested. "Once they walk out that door…"

"And that is what we have to figure out," his partner said. "Show up that Hansen woman on her own formula."

"Well, that discussion certainly has potential," Rin whispered to herself before directing her familiar to follow.

It was relatively easy to keep the bird in perches looking like a mundane decoration for the rare times one of the two men bothered to look back over their shoulder. Rin was disdainfully reminded of so many of those magi that spent all their time in research. Granted, she admitted her perspective on that was unusual for magi. She still considered research the primary duty of a magus, but she had trained the first part of her life for the Grail War and had spent the next few years of her life in various other confrontations, such as the effort to dismantle the Greater Grail. The lab may have been her first home, but the battlefield was her second.

She considered that for a moment and thought about her family. "Make that third home, not second."

When the two scientists opened a door to reveal stairs leading down into the floor below, things got a little bit dicey. There were few perches she could take along that stretch. In fact the only ones she found that would keep her possibly above their line of sight, should they turn around, were the security cameras.

"Did you hear something?" one of the scientists asked as they reached a security entry door at the base of the stairs. He glanced back, barely missing it as Rin winged the familiar over his head to land on the camera above him.

"Stop being paranoid," the other noted. "It was probably just one of the secretaries upstairs. Come on, let's get tonight's work finished and get out of here."

The security door opened up and the bird dropped down to slip in on its little feet in and among the clodding steps of the researchers walking over it. Rin gritted her teeth as she narrowly avoided allowing the bird to be stepped on.

The two scientists immediately set to work moving about the laboratory and apparently lost themselves in the research. With care, Rin began to cause the bird flit about the room, looking for any sign of the dimensional anomaly. The spell she had cast had not been extremely precise, but she felt that she would know it when she found it. Even if nobody else in this world recognized it, she assumed it would fairly reek of magic, the sort of thing Shirou could smell from a city block away.

One thing she was certain of while she scanned about and caught sight of different pieces of paper left out in the lab area. It wasn't her field, but she was familiar enough with the language of euphemism and research to recognize mention of fatalities and military applications. This was beginning to look like the sort of lab that she, Shirou and Saber would be asked to pay a visit to. One of the few times that the Clock Tower's goals of secrecy aligned with her significant others' ethical and moral standards…and her own, if she were to be honest with herself.

She wasn't entirely correct about the nature of the object.

The thing did radiate something that she could feel, but it wasn't magic, at least not in what she considered the traditional sense. The item in question was an odd multi-colored stone sphere set on a pedestal and being used essentially as a paperweight in the middle of the room. It wasn't until she happened to alight next to the thing that she could feel something coming off of it and through the familiar to her.

"I may have just found the cause of the discrepancy in your results gentlemen," Rin noted to herself with a smile. "I'm afraid that I'll have to confiscate it."

Then it was just a matter of finding a discrete place to put the bird while she got herself into position at ground level. That took a few minutes, and when she next focused her attention on the familiar, she found it being examined by one of the two scientists as he talked into a phone.

"-idea where it came from. From what I can tell, it's just a jeweled statue. No I haven't detected any sort of signal coming from it," the man was saying. "Maybe someone just brought it in for a bit of color?"

Rin grimaced and shook her head from where she stood. "Oh well, no matter."

The magus pulled out the Jeweled Sword and began chanting under her breath as she cut through the air around her. The dagger trailed a kaleidoscopic line of energy as she bled prana away from other selves that didn't need it at the moment. Her focus still remained on the familiar, or rather, the jewel it carried with in it.

The scientist got a brief look as the bird disintegrated in his hand revealing an egg-like piece of amethyst out of which washed a barely perceptible field of…greyness. The spell rushed outward to encompass the building, stopping once it hit the other jewels that Rin had prepared to contain it. As the field assimilated the space around it, security systems ceased to function and doors unlocked.

This particular spell was a product of her apprenticeship with Zeltrech and her study of a Reality Marble. Most likely, if the Clock Tower knew about this mystery, she'd have faced a little bit of trouble. It had one purpose: to provide Rin with a quick and easy path to her objective with no left-over trace of her presence. It was more effective on the way in, unfortunately. All it had to do then was filter the probabilities of a path between two points: wherever Rin was and wherever the amethyst egg was. Once she was leaving, it was trying to parse all the possibilities of Rin's egress from where she was to anywhere along the border of the diversion field.

With the familiar consumed as part of the fuel to create the spell, Rin lost track of what was happening at the AIM offices. She didn't let that concern her and merely walked forward into the building, glancing toward the lobby reception counter where the security officer was busy trying to get his phone system to work. He looked up toward her as she walked through the building.

"Hey, you there, where are you going?"

Rin turned to look toward him casually and enacted a simple hypnotism mystery without slowing her pace. "Listen let the fighting cease, close your eyes and sleep in peace."

The man managed to take ten steps toward her and unbutton the holster on his weapon before collapsing to the ground unconscious as Rin calmly walked up to the elevator and pushed a button. She glanced outside to see people casually looking away from the boundaries of the field and stepping around it on the sidewalk. Then the elevator bell dinged and drew her attention back forward.

Ignoring the unconscious man behind her she stepped onto the elevator and ordered it to take her up to the floor with the entrance to the AIM office and laboratory. As the elevator music played, carrying her up to the desired floor she wondered idly if this is what it felt like to be Caster. She immediately dismissed that.

"I'm not a traitorous homicidal bitch," she reminded herself. "Hard to have Caster's point of view without that." She considered things a few more seconds. "I also can't cast at the speed of light."

The elevator dinged as it opened up onto the floor she needed and she stepped out casually looking left and right to see if anybody was in the hallway. Finding it empty, she began to follow the path her familiar had scouted out for her earlier. Coming to the smoked glass entryway of AIM, she grew a little bit more cautious. Slowing her pace and altering her stance to something more tactically practical, she advanced toward the door, pushing it open slowly ready to move if need be.

The lobby on the other side of the door looked empty enough, still, she immediately moved to cover near one of the two entrances across the room. Listening for sounds of movement, she had complaints from further in the offices about how the computers weren't connecting to the internet. Downstairs, she expected to find the security door to the lab locked and the scientists unable to use any intercoms or other equipment to contact out. After all, for the moment, the doors, security and communications acted by her will alone.

With no sign that anybody was coming out of the other offices, Rin advanced toward the door leading downstairs and slipped within it. Behind her, the door closed and locked, barring anybody attempting to wander downstairs to see if anything was wrong in the labs as well. For a bit of added security, she borrowed a little bit of Shirou's tricks and reinforced the door behind her. It was only a matter of time before someone tried an intercom or cellphone for that matter. Plus there was the fact that she'd triggered the field while someone had been in contact on a phone, so reinforcements were likely on the way.

It was at the bottom of the stairs that Rin first heard the sound of someone trying to break through the door above. There was a pause as whoever had slammed the door tried to figure out why the flimsy looking thing was so solid and then the impact repeated. In front of Rin the security door started to pull open.

"….tried every override I know! It won't open," someone was shouting back into the labs. "Check the computers."

"I can't find any sign of a virus or anything," a second voice insisted. "There's no sign of any sort of jamming. There's nothing in the computers that can affect this. Why don't you break that crystal?"

Rin let the security door close behind her, allowed it to seal again and reinforced the portal before turning to follow the voices and finding the same two scientists she'd followed in arguing within the laboratory. One of them turned to see her and froze too long before moving to look for a weapon. His partner was only just turning around.

The magus was across the room in a blink, reinforced muscles giving her greater than human speed. She impacted the far scientist first, grabbing and spinning him across the room into his partner. From there it was just a few short moments before she had them both knocked unconscious without revealing any mysteries. Looking across the room, she saw both her egg and the dimensional anomaly she was hunting and walked calmly over to pick them both up and slip them into a shoulder bag.

Which was when she heard the protests from the security door. Part of her wanted to look over to see what was happening, because it didn't sound like simple brute muscle being applied. That was foolish however, an amateur move. Instead she pushed onward toward the far wall, opening and closing doors as she moved further back toward the outer wall. It left a string of reinforced barriers between the security and her. The infiltration spell was still in operation, leveraging circumstances in her favor. But now that she'd reached the egg, that edge was only slight.

The outer wall was in some sort of supply closet or materials vault but she didn't pause to observe its contents but focused her attention on the wall, stepping forward to push a jewel into it and step back out of the room. The brilliant glow of her jewel built up, washing out of the storage room as she listened to her pursuers crash through walls and doors behind her.

Rin's planned exit was ruined. She'd thought to blow the wall, jump out and then cast the repair spell to seal up the wall behind her. Judging by the rate that people were tearing through barriers to get to her, she'd likely not have time to repair the wall.

Rin readied herself, trying to ascertain the number of foes coming her way as the light ramped up. A glowing, angry looking man burned through the last door behind her. Rin had time to wave at the man before the jewel reached critical and a blast of brilliant light swept back through the doorway, slamming into the obviously altered man and tossing him backwards through what looked like three more of the same burning men. The magus wasted no time rushing into the storage locker and, without breaking stride leaping outward into the open air.

Rin immediately recognized a glitch in her design when she entered open air and the rate of her acceleration downward surpassed that of gravity. Air was parting around her approach and then thrusting down at her back. Apparently the infiltration spell had decided this was the best way to "help" her exit.

Before taking on this plan, she had done some testing to ascertain the tolerances of her current body in comparison to her skill with reinforcement and practically unlimited prana. She'd reasoned that a normal fall of up to eight stories was well within those limits. Shirou could easily handle a falling impact three times terminal velocity, she wasn't sure about herself.

A faint trail of kaleidoscopic light traced behind her as she drew on the Jeweled Sword for more prana, gritting her teeth as she did so. Above her, she could hear the sounds of her pursuers leaping into the same fall, probably finding themselves falling a little bit slower do to the wind plays her field had raised. She twitched as she felt the prana surging through her body but right up against the threshold of tearing it apart and then she hit the ground, doing her best to turn her meteoric fall into roll. She still created something of a small crater on the sidewalk.

Rolling to her feet, she almost missed it as the pedestal and sphere fell out of her shoulder bag and clattered across the pavement. Getting back to her feet was a little bit slower than she liked, even as she eased up on the flow of prana so that her own reinforcement technique wouldn't kill her. She lost another moment glancing across to the pedestal and sphere then checking her shoulder bag. Then her attention was entirely on the two burning men descending down on her.

"Sleeping force of wind I hail," she called out as they came ever closer, "I send you forth a mighty gail."

It was one line out of a longer aria, but it was enough for a minor expression of the full spell. One of the two burning men managed to exhale a blast of pure glowing heat and fire before the wind rose up and slammed into him scattering both him and his partner away.

Rin watched helplessly as that fire was whipped up by the winds and cascaded down on top of her prize.

"Shimatta."

Passing through the air out of their own control, both men erupted out of the area of the infiltration spell and swept out into the streets of New York slamming into the ground tumbling out into traffic. One of them managed to get control of his sprawl and roll up to the sidewalk. Immediately, his eyes scanned about noticing all the people looking on and he tried to force himself to calm down and stop glowing like a neon sign.

His partner was somewhat less lucky as he stood up in time to be slammed into by a city bus. The driver of the bus immediately freaked out and lost control, slamming the vehicle through the fortunately dark store front of a coffeehouse a block away from the building the fight had started at.

"Where the hell did you come from?" a voice demanded as a car pulled up next to the extremis soldier that had safely made it to the sidewalk. The man turned toward the voice and did a double-take.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I was on the phone with the egg heads when everything cut off," the man said. "I've been driving in circles looking for the building for the last five minutes."

"What are you talking about?" the man that had jumped out the hole in the wall asked. "It's right over…"

He pointed and looked around, trying to find the building he'd been inside just a moment ago. He scanned across the scene quickly, looking past all the people running toward the bus crash to see if they could help. The office building was nowhere to be seen, more than that, he couldn't find a hole in the structures around him to indicate that it had ever been there.

"What the hell?"

* * *

><p>Within the bounds of the spell, Rin watched her prize tear apart under the great heat and almost instantly there was a swirling, sucking force that bent inward. She could see her spell tearing at its seams radiating outward from the anomaly and cursed.<p>

Rin drew on the Sword again and her eyes widened as the flow of prana from the Sword was diverted off toward the sucking hole in reality. The destabilization stalled as the flow of energy in from the sword and out through the hole matched. But it wouldn't last and she couldn't say which would break first. Her or the tear. That and there were still two more burning men that had apparently decided to move through the building to get to her.

"No, not prana," she muttered. "It's feeding on alternatives."

Her eyes widened and she looked around. This mystery was a fragment of the Second Magic and approached the level of Marble Phantasm. The anomaly was feeding on her spell and the controlled tears she made via the Sword. Grimacing, Rin focused her mind on the infiltration spell and cut it short. At the same instant, she pulled back the Jeweled Sword and sealed the tears that she had made with it to draw on extra prana.

There was a rushing pressure, not of wind, but of…possibility…that forced Rin to brace herself. Then it all condensed around the remains of the pedestal and sphere, the tear in reality collapsing in on itself with a cracking sound as it lost its fuel. One last flexing of the hole cascaded through the simple diversion field and tore it apart, the gems at the corners of the field reduced to ash. Some of the people on the street turned to look in confusion at the building that they suddenly just noticed standing there when the sound and light of a massive explosion further down the street distracted everyone.

Rin grimaced amidst the sound of screams of pain, but didn't let herself freeze. Ahead of her she saw the last two burning men, no longer hampered in their pursuit by her field, coming out of the building looking toward the explosion in consternation.

"Damn it, Mason blew up," one of them snapped.

The magus wasted no time in taking leave of the scene as fast as she could run on her still reinforced legs. She ducked immediately into an alleyway and took a twisting route away from the scene of this clusterfuck of an operation. Some ten minutes later, she walked out into the street and relaxed her reinforcement to the level where she could walk normally despite the twisting her knee had taken from that damn landing and the strain her body had suffered just to limit the injury to that.

"I'm going to have to refine that spell from fast and easy to fast and safe," she reprimanded herself, trying not to blame herself for the civilian deaths she'd just been at least indirectly responsible for.

Meanwhile, she was out an anomaly to study and had these burning men to consider. Hopefully whatever other anomalies she found weren't in the hands of the same people. If they were, next time she could prepare for that.

One thing was certain, however, whatever had created that anomaly had been malevolent, assuming it was not simply a natural disaster on a multiversal scale. Nothing that devoured possibilities could be termed a good thing.

And it made her very…concerned with the manner of how she had arrived to this reality. Hopefully whatever had brought her here was some other phenomenon.

"This better be you testing me, Zeltrech," she muttered to herself.

* * *

><p>"This is what she was after?" a frowning man with dirty blonde hair noted as he picked through the remains of the half-melted paperweight. "Are you certain?"<p>

"One of the techs recognizes it as something they brought into the office," the serious looking man in front of him said. "We haven't found anything about worth an intrusion about it, Dr Killian."

"How about the facility?" Killian asked.

"Shut down and stripped clean, all the records are erased," the soldier assured him. "There was always a chance for an episode near a facility."

Killian nodded in confirmation. "Did we get any identification on the intruder?"

"No, all the security systems were…" he frowned a moment. "Not shut down, they were…appropriated. We couldn't find faults or viruses in the system, no power failures or anything like that. It was just…as if the security system didn't want to record the intruder. For that matter, reports are that doors locked behind her, slowing down responses. Again, no sign of tampering."

"I'll give the intelligence security division a kick in the ass to upgrade our firewalls," Killian said. "What about this woman."

"Superhuman, using what looked like a glowing dagger of some kind," the soldier said. "You think maybe…"

"Asgardian?" Killian asked, gesturing widely. "It makes sense, they conceal their tech in the form of archaic weapons. But what was this that the Asgardians would want it?"

* * *

><p>Does anybody else get annoyed with filtering software ruining more and more scene change marker methods?<p>

Anyway. As to what from Marvel, Rin has, I'm not quite saying more than what's in the story already. Most will guess anyway. As to the stuff she displays, Rin uses reinforcement methods in the recent UFOTable reboot, both when she's pursuing Shirou in the school (to increase her speed and agility) and when escaping Lancer, though likely that was successful because Lancer wasn't going all out against her yet.

I should also note that I am aware that there is no need for the majority of magi, Rin definitely included, to use an aria on a hypnotism...but the aria in question is a little bit of nostalgia from my Amtgard days and I like incantations anyway...so a moment of author appeal.


End file.
